Imagine you are at the Supreme Court waiting for a verdict. Unfortunately for you, the verdict was not in your favor. So what do you do? Naturally, you ignore the judge’s verdict and pressure him and the entire community to change the verdict because it didn’t float your boat.

As you can already tell, this action has many negative consequences and is detrimental to society. If we operated under the system which is displayed in the previous example, the idea of justice would fall apart, because every case that would get brought up would be challenged in this manner. Fortunately, this is not seen in today’s legal environment, or is it?

The Iowa Supreme Court gave its verdict on the issue of gay marriage in April 3, 2009. The Iowa Supreme Court found that the ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional. Although this was a State Supreme Court and not the U.S. Supreme Court, the state legislators are bound by the State Supreme Court decision.

Now, if everything goes as it should, gay marriage will be legalized in the state of Iowa and no legislator will try to stop that. Unfortunately that’s not the case.

Iowa conservatives stated that they would not try to pass legislation against gay marriage because it would affect the coming elections, Jan. 5, 2010. However, they have vowed to pass legislation and an amendment to overturn it.

In late 2009 they attempted several times to pass an amendment against gay marriage with no such luck. The point is, if they are going to disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision anyway, why bother to have one. It thus makes us have to stop and think about the purpose of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is the court where all of the constitutionally important cases go for a definitive and final analysis on its constitutionality. The idea is to have unbiased justices who would not be coerced by pressure from politicians or the public. This is great, and so far it’s stayed pretty much that way. However, the reality is that there are groups out there that are trying to diminish that distance from political pressure and influence the decisions of the court. It is thus our duty to hold in mind the purpose of the Supreme Court, and make sure things stay the way they are supposed to be.

One big question lingering in our minds is in what way the Supreme Court’s purpose is being diminished, not because of their authority decreasing but because of the same reasons as discussing in my very first example. The problem is that a case will be sent to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will make a decision based on the constitution. Then, if politicians disagree with the ruling of the Supreme Court today, they will simply ignore it, and try to pass legislation against it.

However, just like any debate, there are two sides. One argument is that certain issues need to be attacked by legislators if those legislators feel that it goes against the common good. Although this is a valid point, the argument falls flat when you consider the idea of precedent. If one was to successfully pass legislation or an amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling then it would set precedent for anyone else to challenge any other Supreme Court ruling. The idea is that if this gets passed then it would set precedent for anyone else who didn’t like a ruling to challenge it and try to overturn it which would lead to crumbling justice system.

A common misconception is that the Supreme Court’s decisions are final; this is not the case. The Supreme Court has the power to overturn its previous rulings. An example of this would be when slavery was abolished. In this instance a faulty Supreme Court ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court. This goes to show that just because the Supreme Court makes a ruling doesn’t necessarily make it final.

The purpose of the Supreme Court is to decide the issues that would be biased to be resolved anywhere else. To try to overturn a Supreme Court ruling would give precedent to overturn any piece of legislation and any ruling in the court system which would lead in chaos. We need to re-examine the purpose of the Supreme Court so we can get our agenda back to normal.