American Politics Today - Essentials (3rd Ed)

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I

N JUNE 2012, THE SUPREME COURT THRUST itself into the middle of

election-year politics by deciding two cases—one concerning health care

reform (see Chapters 3 and 14) and one on immigration policy—that had

important political implications. In the 2012–13 term, the Court was slated to

hear cases on politically controversial issues, including affi rmative action in

higher education, same-sex marriage, and the Voting Rights Act. Scholars of

the Court had to reach back to 1936 and the battles between the Court and

President Franklin Roosevelt to fi nd a comparable period in which the Court was

so involved with the central political debates of the day.

In the 2012 health care and immigration cases, the Supreme Court largely

ruled in favor of national power, disappointing conservatives who had hoped

that the Court would strike down the laws that were involved. The Court’s

decision about which path to take in a given case is often very political,

involving confl ict, tradeoffs, and compromise, much like decision-making in

Congress. That the Supreme Court is a policy-making and political institution

may seem inappropriate. After all, the guiding principles of the “rule of law”

in the American political system—embodied in the words carved above the

entrance to the Supreme Court (“equal justice under the law”) and the statue

of Justice represented as a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales—seem

to contradict the view of a political Supreme Court. We normally think of the

court as objectively applying the law and interpreting the Constitution for

each case. But the immigration and health care cases clearly represented

IN 2012, THE SUPREME COURT RULED

on a controversial immigration

law passed by the state of

Arizona. Confl ict surrounded the

issue, but the Court's decision

also refl ected a compromise

between national power and

states' rights.