The Supreme Court holds a great deal of power in the United States. The influence of the Supreme Court is felt throughout history and is ingrained in the lives of the American people. Citizenship, the right to vote, marry and abort and many more important cases have all been decided in the Supreme Court. Every citizen and person in the United States has been affected by the decisions of the justices of the Supreme Court. Origins of the Supreme Court The origin of the Supreme Court begins in Article III of the Constitution (History of the Federal Judiciary, n. d. ).
The Founding Fathers saw the Supreme Court as necessary to help govern the country as a united nation. The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over cases involving states and diplomats. A case may reach the Supreme Court through the appeals process but the Supreme Court is not obligated to try every case that is presented to them. The Judiciary Act of 1789 established a Supreme Court with one chief justice and five associate justices (History of the Federal Judiciary, n. d. ). The size of the Supreme Court later grew to eight associate justices to accommodate the growing size of the nation.
In charge of the Supreme Court is the Chief Justice. The Chief Justice is appointed by the President of the United States. The appointment of any justice must be approved and voted on by the Senate. It is preferable if the President does not appoint a new justice in an election year as many believe it should be up to the new President to decide who they want. The senate does not have to approve a nominee and for that reason the President needs to weigh his options in candidates to make sure to nominate someone the senate will approve.
The Supreme Court carries the name of the current Chief Justice. For instance, the current Supreme Court is called Roberts court because John Roberts Jr. is the current Chief Justice. Chief Justice Roberts was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005. Chief Justice Roberts will hold his position for life as justices serve for life or until they choose to retire. The Supreme Court was inundated with cases to try at the beginning because the jurisdiction had not been established and lower courts had not been in play.
The act establishing the circuit of appeals in 1891 allowed the justices to be able to restrict the right of automatic appeal to the Supreme Court and deflect cases to a lower court (History of the Federal Judiciary, n. d. ). A case is no longer automatically appealed to the Supreme Court thus allowing the Justices to choose which cases are more important for them to hear. The Supreme Court has ruled on many important cases throughout its history. A few that are well known are Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, Reynolds v. United States, Elk v.
Wilkins and many more. The Supreme Court is partially responsible for assisting Americans achieve the freedoms they have today by upholding many of the articles found in the Constitution and interpreting the Constitution for all to understand. Limited Terms Article III of the Constitution holds that Justices may keep their positions during good behavior and receive compensation for their service (A Brief Overview of the Supreme Court, 2016). Of course the Constitution was written hundreds of years ago when the average lifespan of an adult male rarely entered into the seventies and eighties.
Now many justices are serving for well over ten or even twenty years. For instance, Justice Stevens took his position at the Supreme Court in 1975 and retired in 2010. Currently Justice Kennedy has been serving since 1988 (Biographies of Current Justices of the Supreme Court, 2016). The only check and balance on the Supreme Court is the appointment process. But with Justices staying in their positions for well over 10 years on average since 1970, vacancies are few and far between thus allowing the check to weaken (Calabresi & Lindgre, 2006). Lifetime terms exceeding 15 years is most likely not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
Many argue for limited terms in all judicial courts not excluding the Supreme Court. Judges have a large influence and the decisions they make especially in the Supreme Court have a profound effect on the people of the United States. Depending on who the Chief Justice is, the Supreme Court can be known to lean conservatively or liberally. Currently, Roberts’s court is considered a more conservative court but if President Obama is able to elect a justice before his term ends this fall then the voting can begin to be liberally minded as he has appointed many left wing justices such as Justice Sotomayor.
The political influences the court has cannot be ignored. Limited terms can either help or hinder this aspect depending on which side of the isle one is on. If there was a limited term many of the more conservative minded justices would no longer be serving and President Obama would have most likely appointed more left minded justices thus changing the Supreme Court. Many argue for a limited eighteen-year term. Supreme Court Justices should be independent of some political pressures and, with a fixed eighteen-year nonrenewable terms, justices should be able to remain somewhat independent of political pressures (Calabresi & Lindgre, 2006).
Each presidency has a great influence on the Supreme Court depending on how many justices they are able to appoint throughout their time in the White House. It can be argued that same-sex marriage would have never passed if more conservative justices have been on the court rather than some of the Democratic appointees. Politics have a great influence on the court. Brown v. Board of Education The influence of the Supreme Court cannot be ignored. The Supreme Court has helped to unite the country and to divide it. A case known to everyone is Brown v. Board of Education.
Simply put, a father named Oliver Brown did not see why his daughter had to travel farther to an all-black school when there was a white school closer to home (Halberstam, p. 413). Prior to desegregation, facilities for blacks and whites were supposed to separate but equal. Though facilities for blacks were never equal to facilities for whites. Southern states were spending twice as much on the education of white children as they were for black children and four times as much for school facilities for whites versus blacks (Halberstam, p. 414). Brown v.
Board of Education ruling perhaps is the most influential legal decision of the 20th century (Moore Il & Lewis, 2014). It reinforced that separate but equal was nowhere near equal and never would be. The Supreme Court also solidified the right to an education equal to your peers is a fundamental right to all children in the United States regardless of color (Moore Il & Lewis, 2014). The Brown v. Board of Education decision not only legally ended segregation but it denied segregationists of their moral and separatist logic behind segregation (Halberstam, 1993).
Many who approved of segregation saw blacks as a lower species than whites and found it appropriate to separate the races. Thus ending segregation helped to push them toward ending their reasoning behind their beliefs. Brown did much more than desegregate schools it started a movement. After the Brown decision, the black South was inspired and soon began protests, and the decision’s annual anniversary quickly became a symbol for the growing movement for civil rights (Bond, 2015).
