U.S. Supreme Court

When you look at a country you would think that the president, dictator, or whatever leader is in control of the country would have the most power. However, in America that is not the case. The most power held by a group or official in America is held not by the president, but by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is made up of nine justices. Every justice is appointed by a president (the president has to be residing in office at the time in which they appoint any justice). After being appointed by a president the appointed judge has to receive a majority vote of yes in the U.S. Senate to actually become a judge-elect. The most well known judge of the group is almost always the chief justice. The chief justice is the justice in the Supreme Court that is essentially the leader of the group and is always in charge of what information will be covered each week as well as how the meetings will play out. Like I hinted at at the beginning of this paragraph, the Supreme Court has the most power of any official or group in the U.S. Why is this the case? It’s because they can check all the actions of the other officials and groups (which includes the executive branch of the president as well as the legislative branch of Congress). It was created this way in the Constitution of the United States so no branch of Congress gets too powerful for the other and causes issues for our country.

As someone who enjoys learning about history I would say I already knew pretty much all the majority of the things the SCOTUS History Channel article talked about in depth. However, there were a few things I had not thought about in a while that I thought were interesting. For example, I think it is very interesting that George Washington wanted the Supreme Court to have six justices. You would think that nothing would really get accomplished when you have six judges because many votes would end in a three to three tie. Eventually our country realized this, which is why we have nine justices now, so there will never not be a majority vote winner. What is interesting is that it took the U.S. officials so long to figure that out. Congress changed the number of Supreme Court justices there were six different times. During this time of change the number fluctuated between five and ten, before the official number of nine justices was set in 1869. To me looking at this you can get the biggest take-away from the Supreme Court that you need to get. You can have a great country such as America, but people are never going to all agree. Since this is the case you have to have a fair way to make the country’s systems the way that the majority of the country wants their systems to be. Obviously there are always going to be people that are upset. The Democratic Party is going to be upset whenever the Republican Party wins something and vise versa, but you have to go with what the majority of your country wants to see happen.

I think it is surprising that in 1790, when the Supreme Court was scheduled to have its first meeting, it was postponed because some of the justices could not make it on time. I know they didn’t have nearly the level of transportation and technology we have nowadays, but I feel like with how excited our founding fathers were to get the Supreme Court off the ground, they would’ve made sure everyone was present the day of the first official U.S. Supreme Court meeting. After watching the videos I have more thanksgiving for the Supreme Court. Many other countries have problems with their government and/or president getting too powerful. We really don’t have that problem in America and a big reason for it is the Supreme Court. I also want to point out how incredibly smart our founding fathers were to realize that we didn’t necessarily need a Supreme Court when our country was founded, but we would down the road so they went ahead and saved us some heartache and headache and created one.