Letters to the editor: Supreme Court's power; lowering the flag for the Queen?

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Court shouldn’t get the last word

During a judicial conference in Colorado, Chief Justice Roberts defended the authority of the Supreme Court in response to critics questioning its legitimacy.

In an interview, he asked who would take up the task of interpreting the law if the court did not. “You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is, and you don’t public opinion to be the guide about what the appropriate decision is,” he said.

Perhaps the special audience Roberts was addressing agreed. Many of us would not. I personally would answer yes to both statements, Yes, vehemently, passionately.

Our Constitution, ratified two years before the Fall of the Bastille, hardly reflected democratic models from our Western World. There were none. Instead, the propertied white men who wrote it attempted to protect against the alleged “passions” of the multitude by diluting the power of the voters.

One such method was the Electoral College, which resulted twice this century with the two worst administrations of modern times: the first allowing a terrorist attack through inattention and then pulling the country into two seemingly endless wars, one of which palpably about oil.

The second gave America a lawless narcissist, most aptly described by journalist Bob Woodward as a mob boss. We are still suffering from the damage done, most notably to the Judiciary, by partisan appointments of judges. Three of them are Roberts’ colleagues.

The Constitution does not specifically give the last word to the Supreme Court. That came about in 1803 when a dispute about the outgoing administration’s many last-minute judicial appointments were challenged. The court sided with the lame-duck appointees (Marbury v. Madison), thus establishing the court’s right to intervene.

But if 50-year-old Roe v. Wade could fall, why not Marbury v. Madison?

Margaret Morris, Ventura

Lower the flag for mass shootings

Today I saw our flag at half-mast at the YMCA where I swim. After asking at the front desk why the flag was down, the receptionist answered, “It’s for the Queen.” Assuming this was the Queen of England and not the United States, I replied to blank stares across the counter, “Thank God, no more children have been shot.”

It then dawned on me that we don’t lower the flag for mass shootings of children in their classrooms, just old queens, not even of our land. And this got me thinking of us reprioritizing the reasons for which we lower our flag. Perhaps for every child shot in school trying to prepare for the future, the flag should be lowered. Lowered for a lost future, for a lost country that will never be what it would have been otherwise.

“But the flag will always be low if it is lowered for every child,” they will say.

“Then it will always be low until our land deserves to have it high,” I will answer.

Barclay Totten, Oxnard

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Letters: Supreme Court's power; lowering the flag for the Queen?