The US Supreme Court

    

    The Supreme Court is a powerful and important part of our democratic society. It is arguably the one agency that holds our democracy together. It is also something I am sure every American child has learned of or at least heard about at some point. I have even taken a government class, but yet there are still things I did not know about the Supreme Court. 

      After reading this article by the History channel, I learned many new things about the Supreme Court. Firstly, the first court meeting ever held was on February 2, 1790. What is more interesting is that there were no cases heard in the entire first term. The first meetings were instead concerned with working out organizational procedures instead. I guess I always assumed that the court had a plan beforehand and jumped right into judging cases, but apparently not. The second new thing I learned is that the justices of the Supreme Court are nominated by the President and then either confirmed or denied by the Senate. I had never really considered who appointed new justices before now, nor had I considered who had the power to determine if they were accepted or not. 

    The third thing I learned was that the first Supreme Court was made up of 6 members, with the Chief Justice being John Jay. The rest of the members included John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison, and James Wilson. I had heard of John Jay being the Chief Justice before, but I never remembered hearing all the names of the other members. I also learned that the Chief Justice also presides over Presidential impeachment trials. I knew some court dealt with this, but for some reason, I never realized it was the Supreme Court's responsibility. 

  Out of all of the things I learned, the most important thing I took away was that the Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the world. This is because the Court has the ultimate jurisdiction over all laws and is responsible for determining if those laws are constitutional or not. This also means that the Court has the ability to check the actions of the branches (the legislative and executive) to keep them from gaining too much power.

    The most surprising thing I learned though came from this video where there are a group of justices talking about their experiences of being on the Supreme Court. In the video, they mention that the first thing they do before anything else is shake hands. Shaking hands is the first thing they do even before starting a conference or even sitting down at the bench. This was so surprising to me because it seems like both an odd, yet wholesome tradition. To me, it showed how human they all are because they all wanted to shake hands before starting any other business. 

    Even though I learned many things, my general feelings about the Supreme Court did not change much. I now have a greater appreciation for the work they do since I now know that each justice reads all the appeal cases themselves before considering which ones should be taken by the Court. That is a tremendous amount of work and someone, like a justice, would have to really love his/her job to put that much time and energy into it. But besides that, my opinion on the Court has not changed. I always knew that it was valuable and had many responsibilities and I will continue to think this way. But it was nice to learn new facts about the Court even if they did not greatly change my views.