Photo by Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash
In Florida, a bill that blatantly violates the First Amendment has been proposed by Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-FL); the legislation would require bloggers who profit from posting about any elected state official, including controversial Gov. Ron DeSantis, to register with the state. While there is no way this bill would stand unchallenged if passed, the mere proposal of this bill is still terrifying in how it represents a trend of those involved in government disrespecting the authority of the Constitution.
Our country and Constitution were created with the intent of having a free press – the catalyst for our democracy – and allowing journalists to keep the government in check. Having individuals in our government who seek to undermine these principles is frightening. The proposal of this bill, along with other anti-constitutional sentiments, from those involved in our government has put the Constitution’s legitimacy at a new low.
The attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and how these actions were downplayed and even supported by elected officials such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), are the crux of how our constitution is ridiculed. For those not convinced of the insurrection’s unconstitutionality, Donald Trump himself acknowledged that attempts to overturn the 2020 election conflict with our constitution in a Truth Social post, by saying “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” The respect for the Constitution is so low that a former president, who is running for election again called for its termination.
This ridicule of our constitution can be seen in our Supreme Court, the branch of government responsible for interpreting the Constitution. The Supreme Court exists to ensure that the laws passed by Congress are constitutional, but it has tainted the legitimacy of the Constitution both in how active the court is and how its decisions are often based in party politics and ideology. The court takes about 100 cases per year currently, while in the founding of the Supreme Court, cases were sparse, with the first case taken two years after the court’s founding. The court only chose to act when an issue was deemed necessary, in order to preserve the legitimacy of both the Supreme Court and the Constitution. Now precedent is being re-examined for no reason other than that the ideological majority of the court has changed.
The obvious example of this is the Dobbs decision, in which the precedent set by Roe v. Wade was overturned despite nothing fundamentally changing about the abortion debate or the content of the Constitution in any applicable way since Roe. Multiple court members who chose to take the case have indicated Roe was untouchable precedent. The case was neither timely nor constitutionally relevant. The decision to take this case had nothing to do with the Constitution itself, but the ideology of the court’s members; the only feasible reason that the Roe precedent would be re-examined was that the ideological majority of the court shifted. The problem is not the decision itself, but its underlying motivations. Some members of our court are exploiting their authority around the Constitution, to legislate in ways that should be reserved for other branches of government.
Even if the Supreme Court were to make policy decisions agreeable to most people, this argument would still persist. Our Constitution and its interpretation should be above party politics and ideology, yet our Supreme Court has made sure that the legal precedent around this document is susceptible to partisan influence.
When the branch of government responsible for making sure our laws follow the Constitution is hijacking its authority to make inappropriate policy decisions based on ideology rather than the content of the Constitution, timeliness of the issue being reviewed or even the popular opinions of the American people, it creates a looming threat of what laws could be possible in the future if this behavior worsens.
As discussed earlier, many lawmakers do not respect our constitution, and this has extended past rhetoric that undermines its principles to actual legislation. If the trend of our Supreme Court making increasingly partisan-motivated decisions and haphazardly changing the interpretation of our guiding document continues, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that blatantly unconstitutional laws such as the one proposed by Brodeur could go unchallenged in the future if we don’t address this behavior.
Having a guiding document to protect us from tyrannical and arbitrary rule has been essential in preserving our democracy, which is why it is crucial to demand more out of those in government to respect the Constitution’s authority in their lawmaking and rhetoric.
