The Highest Court in the Land

    The Supreme Court of the United States has a unique and critical function in the successful running of the nation. When watching this video about the Supreme Court, I learned that the court reviews appeals from cases from lower courts where a law might be unconstitutional or when due process may have not been abided by properly. In addition, I learned that they sift through thousands of cases every year while only taking up about 100 every year. The longest part of the process is sometimes actually just writing their opinions because there has to be some sense of cooperation between the justices and then many of the results are released at the end of the term in June. 

    The most important point about the Supreme Court is that they have a specific process and mindset for deciding cases. We hear in the media today that the justices always align with their political beliefs in their decisions, and the beliefs usually align with the administration that nominated them. While there may some truth to these sentiments as their way of looking at things usually aligns with their political beliefs, it is not fully true. In truth, justices must interpret the case based only on strictly what the Constitution says, not what they believe to be necessarily morally "right". Also, the Supreme Court is possibly the most powerful of the three branches because of "judicial review" which allows to strike down or overturn anything from the other two branches as unconstitutional. 

    The fact that the court takes up so few cases in comparison to the number of appeals is surprising. Also, the justices said they took up around 100 cases every year, this number sounds actually pretty high to me as I am not familiar with many of their regular decisions that are not landmark decisions. Another surprising fact is that the Supreme Court was not always morally sound as sometimes they made horrible moral decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson and others. 

    The video showed me that the Supreme Court is not as political as people make it out to be. There is a reason and a rationale to all of their actions and decisions. Also, I used to think that the Supreme Court was very secretive about many of its actions, but in reality the way they do things and make decisions is not secretive and well known: interpret each case following the Constitution.