The Supreme Court issued a bunch of disappointing rulings this past week (and might well be slated to issue another one Monday morning).
American voters from 1988 helped to shape those rulings because there are two justices on the Supreme court that were appointed by George H.W. Bush.
And of course, it goes further back than that. Bush didn’t magically just show up on the ballot in ’88; he had a career spanning decades that steadily led him into the national spotlight to the point where he could secure the Republican nomination.
It’s in this vein that I’m sick of the tired tropes that get rolled out every election season. “These are the two best people we found for the highest office?” 🙄
We feign surprise at Biden’s age, as if we didn’t know in 2020 that he would be four years older in 2024.
People don’t just pop up out of obscurity and show up on the general election ballot every four years, but voters and our major political parties don’t put the effort into supporting the next generation of leaders, and so we consistently end up with weak primary candidates and suboptimal nominees.
Voters in the ’60s in Texas were indirectly shaping Supreme Court opinions in 2024 when Bush was elected to his first congressional office. US voters in the ’60s were doing the same when they elected Nixon who appointed Bush as a UN ambassador. And voters across the US today are shaping court opinions decades from now with who we pick in November, and which people we elect in other elections who will rise through the ranks to eventually run for president. We may even be shaping future court opinions by way of which celebrities we are paying attention to and supporting, as we found out when we elected Trump in ’16.
Voting decisions don’t always feel big. They especially don’t feel big if the candidate you supported doesn’t manage to follow through on what they campaigned on. But the influence is very real, and if you look long enough you’ll see it. And it’s not just SCOTUS justices; it’s through hundreds of other judicial appointments that make up the federal court system. It’s through policy decisions federal agencies make. It’s through the direction that administrations set.
Democracy works. There’s a lot of inertia keeping the US from doing the things a clear majority wants right now, but participating in the democratic process is the only tool we have to fix those issues, and that’s only if people keep showing up to it and investing in being knowledgeable about candidates.
SCOTUS is packed right now with right-wing justices who are twisting logic and some misguided sense of “originalism” to push through an extremist agenda, and Americans need to fix that, and the only way to fix that is going to be to elect presidents who will replace these justices with more sensible alternatives as they age out. But it requires that we keep our eyes on our goal; we can’t just show up to the polls once then stay home afterwards when everything doesn’t magically turn around overnight. America didn’t end up the way it is overnight, and a reform won’t fix everything immediately.
So vote, because it makes a difference. It sucks that we struggle with issues today and our vote today can’t fix those issues, but for better or for worse it’s the most effective tool we have.
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