Sitting down next to me on the sofa, eating “brunch” on a Monday in the family room, he saw that I was watching the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Senator Sasse from Nebraska had just begun his opening remarks.
“Huge parts of what we’re doing in this hearing would be really confusing to eighth-graders,” Sasse said.
My son’s eyes and ears seemed to perk up. Although he was a ninth-grader now, he’d graduated eighth-grade in June. Senator Sasse, who looks very similar to “Mr. M,” one of my son’s favorite teachers, went on to say that the Senate Judiciary Committee also had a civic duty to eighth-graders watching from their classrooms. My son looked up from his phone and Instagram.
“Civics is the stuff that all Americans should agree on, like religious freedom is essential,” my son was still listening. “People should be able to fire the folks who write the laws. And voters, we can’t fire the judges. Judges should be impartial. This is just civics 101,” Sasse said.
I agreed with what the Republican senator had just said, but I “paused” him with the remote to refill my coffee cup. Walking into the kitchen, I asked my son, “What did you learn the most from Mr. M last year about civics?"
“Checks and balances,” he immediately said.
“So what exactly does it mean?” I asked.
“Three different branches to balance and check each other, Mom.” Duh, his tone suggested.
I’ll admit, although I did know what it meant, I wasn’t exactly sure if “checks and balances” was written or defined in the Constitution. I refilled my cup and lazily asked Siri to look up “checks and balances.” Her search brought up various things, and I learned that, in fact, there is no specific mention of the phrase in the Constitution. But Britannica defines it like this, “Checks and balances: principle of government under which separate branches are empowered to prevent actions by other branches and are induced to share power. Checks and balances are applied primarily in constitutional governments. They are of fundamental importance in tripartite governments, such as that of the United States, which separate powers among legislative, executive, and judicial branches.”
I couldn’t have agreed more with Senator Sasse about reminding everyone, and especially eighth-graders and high school students, how our government is structured and why it’s structured this way. Another interesting fact I learned, thanks to my son's comments, as Senator Sasse sat frozen on “pause,” was that the framers of the Constitution didn’t exactly agree on which branch of government would be responsible for appointing nominees to a national judiciary.
According to Edgar B. Herwick III, who holds degrees in history and communications from Villanova University in Philadelphia, the framers argued about it.
Herwick published an article two years ago that included details from James Madison’s "Notes of Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787.” In his piece, Herwick talks about how the framers got “the judicial ball rolling in Philadelphia [on a Monday in June]."
Delegates from the convention did unanimously agree that there should be a national judiciary, and they’d also agreed that tenure should be given to justices, because it would help them to remain impartial instead of having to tailor their decisions every few years to “the pleasures of the institution that was doing the appointing.” However, who or which institution should appoint justices “was mostly an argument about power,” Herwick points out.
Earlier in the 1787 federal convention, large and small states finally came to an agreement about equal power in Congress, agreeing that states would have the same number of senators: two each. Still, “large states felt they’d have more sway over who became president, so they began to favor shifting powers, like appointing judges, to the executive branch.” This lead to another major compromise during the convention, “the president would appoint, but the Senate would have to approve.”
So, political power has always been a part of American government and civics, and if a 14-year-old understands this and the need for “checks and balances” in selecting a Supreme Court justice, why don't adults in the Senate?
Senator Sasse talked about the need to “distinguish between civics and politics,” in judiciary confirmation hearings, but the hearings took place because an extremely political president wanted to seat a Supreme Court justice before an election he may lose. The very fact that a Senate judiciary committee was even in session this close to a presidential election completely undermines Sasse’s "lesson" to eighth-graders about keeping politics out of SCOTUS confirmation hearings. The hearings were all about political power and the push by Republicans senators to try to control each branch of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. If it were the other way around, and Democrats were attempting to seat a Supreme Court justice days before a presidential election, Republicans would certainly call them out on their power grab too.
Examining why President Lincoln delayed his Supreme Court nomination in 1864, just 27 days before his reelection, is another terrific lesson in civics. I’d hoped that Senator Sasse, who I’d “un-paused” on the TV, would also mention it in his civics lesson to eighth-graders. He didn’t.
So why did Lincoln delay his Supreme Court nomination to after the 1864 election, even though his Republican party controlled the Senate? Was Lincoln a seasoned politician? Absolutely. Could his reasons for delaying the nomination until Dec. 6 be explained by various things? 1) The country was fighting a Civil War, and 2) Congress was out of session until early December in 1864. Additionally, 3) Republican senators were likely preoccupied with their own reelection campaigns, just as Lincoln probably was. So, yes, these reasons could definitely explain Lincoln's delay.
However, if you apply today’s standards to Lincoln’s decision to wait until after an election, it could also be inferred that he felt that the voices of the American people and their right to vote and reaffirm their next president and state representatives was more important than any political rhetoric or agenda.
My 14-year-old, his 17-year-old sister, and children just like them all over the country, will vote in the next 2-4 years. They will likely “fire the folks who write the laws,” as Sasse put it, to save the future of their planet, to stand with dreamers and children still separated from their parents, to stand with Black Americans fighting to change ingrained systemic racism and injustice, to stand with their LGTBQ friends and family who have just as much right to marriage equality and happiness in this country as everyone else. Teenagers bring some semblance of hope to our democracy, because they have no problem calling out BS when they see and smell it. And as for a more perfect union, their voices and votes are certainly a "jump start" towards a chance at it.
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