Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, unfortunately, passed away on September 18th of 2020.  A day after, Mitch McConnell has already said that a new Supreme Court Justice candidate “will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” This might seem merely callous until you remember that Mitch McConnell refused to nominate a new Justice for eleven months during Former President Obama’s presidency.

This is but one of the many problems with our current treatment of the judicial system. The Supreme Court is supposed to be a pillar of Justice, the body entreated with voiding unconstitutional laws and making the most important legal decisions in the country. The Supreme Court should never be, and was never supposed to be, a tool for a political party to validate their decisions. It is laid out in the Constitution as a body that is intended to prevent corruption and the destruction of the democratic system, and using it as a method to gain political power deeply jeopardizes that system. The same man that prevented one president from nominating a Justice almost a year before the election and is now supporting the same measures less than fifty days before an election. The parallels are enough to make one wonder if there are political motives at play.

Much of the American government has become highly politicized. The difference in the treatment of Obama’s nomination and those made by current President Trump suggests that this partisanship is extending to the Supreme Court as well, and now more than ever. It cannot be just to treat the greatest arbiter of our nation- the Supreme Court—as merely another tool for political gain. The interaction of governmental branches, the checks, and balances of our system, require that the Supreme Court remains as nonpartisan as it can be. 

To that end, something must be done. It appears that our government officials will not stop this on their own, so we must pressure them. Contact the offices of your Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul and let them know that they will not be receiving your support if they aid this motion to put a new Justice on the bench. We can’t let one of the last bastions of justice in our government be subverted into another political body.

eatured Image Citation: “My Trusty Gavel” by Brian Turner is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic. No changes were made to the image. Use of this photo does not indicate photographer endorsement of this article.