You Should Really Thank Me

A lot of things go through my head that aren't funny, or interesting to most people. Subjects that use no slang, abbreviated words or curses. While I obvi know that this isn't the fucking place for those kinds of subjects, bear with me because I'm about to bring up the relationship between our Supreme Court and the high courts of other nations.

Sorry.

So...our Supreme Court was the 1st independent high court in like the whole history of the world. Because we started that and also because of inventing the whole big D Democracy thing foreign constitutional courts have frequently cited our decisions when making decisions in similar cases. The idea being that we knew what's up and were the standard bearer of what would be up in the future. In the last 5-10 years, however, there's been a marked drop in foreign courts citing our decisions. By a lot. Like half and even three quarters in some countries. It doesn't sound like a big deal but it is; it's all part and parcel of the erosion of our moral and political primacy in the world.

Actually before the Roberts court there used to be quite a bit of back and forth citing. Even in 2003 when our Supreme Court overturned that horrible Texas law making gay sex illegal, Kennedy cited 3 decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. However the prevailing mood, lead by Scalia, Alito and Roberts, of the Supreme court now is strict Constitutional interpretation which, basically, makes foreign decisions moot.

OK, fine, maybe you believe that everything anyone ever needed to know about the law was thought out perfectly by like 20 white guys 200 years ago, but it's having a chilling effect on our, America's, influence over international law and our global position in general.

Because A. Guess what Yankee, you don't care what we have to say then we extra don't give a crap about what you have to say. B. We, and by we, I mean the entire world, hate, really viscerally hate, your President and his policies, and do not want to be associated with him or them in any way. C. Yeah, you aren't the only game in town any more. Plenty of other well established Democracies have powerful constitutional courts with tons of decisions to site and um, much better stances on human rights.

Obviously it's more complicated than all that and, if this post didn't bore you enough, read this much longer and more fact filled article in the NYTimes.

If it bored the ba-jesus out of you, scroll down and look at Miley Cyrus's boyfriend in his underwear. Sometimes I just have to get these things out of my system.

PS. Thank you to Kendra for reminding me how to spell