Natural speed please
The article that I’m going to talk is entitled “Why the Supreme Court should be the biggest issue of the 2016 campaign”. It was extracted from the Washington Post.
The Supreme Court is composed of 8 members, 8 justices and 1 chief justice, appointed for life by the President, with the consent of the Senate. The SC today has 5 Republican nominations and 4 Democratic nominations.
The liberal Supreme Court’s oldest member (81 yo), Ruth Bader Ginsburg left the hospital last week after having a heart stent implanted. For several years, liberals have encouraged her to leave her job so that the president Obama could appoint a younger justice who shares the same values as her/have similar views. However, after many years of health problems, she insists that she is still able to exercise and that she has no plan to retire before the end of President Obama’s term. That means that the makeup of the Supreme Court could be a bigger campaign issue in 2016.
Whether a democrat or a republican wins in 2016, he may have the chance to have a swing vote in the court. If the president in 2016 is a Republican, Ginsburg’s seat will go to a conservative. And the already conservative court will move further to the right.
I’ve decided to choose this article because it is linked to our lecture about the Supreme Court and also because it emphasize two key notions that we’ve seen, which are ‘swing vote’ and ‘judicial activism’. So the choice of a Supreme Court justice by a democrat or a republican President is important because it determines the laws of all the American such as gay rights, abortion, death penalty etc. It’s a very political process.
