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Disagreement Is The Core Of Our Democracy.It Fuels Congressional

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Disagreement is the core of our democracy. It fuels Congressional debates which set forth policy, leads to passionate debates between presidential candidates, and ultimately allows people with different ideas to unify under one government. Separate from these ideological differences and massive arguments, supposedly, is the court system. In the views of a constrained court, judges don’t make laws, they only enforce their rules in compliance with the Constitution. However, as is clearly evident in the court case Windsor v United States, the Constitution in itself is vague, complicated, and often open to interpretation. In effect, the United States’ courts revolve around applying very few concepts to thousands of disputes. As the …show more content…

Windsor filed a suit arguing the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, which eventually reached the Supreme Court, resulting in a 5-4 decision. The majority opinion argued that the Defense of Marriage Act operated in effect to single out one group of people, those of same-sex marriages. Accordingly, the act deprived only some legally recognized couples of the rights and responsibilities which were allowed to other legally recognized couples, thus denying these couples the right to the equal protection of the law as stated in the 14th amendment. The dissents of the ruling were interesting, but perhaps the most compelling arguments were that the right to same-sex marriage was not a guarantee by the Constitution, and that the majority’s accusations towards the legislative and executive branches created a judicial superiority. Clearly this culturally significant court case represents the ideas of a dynamic court view. In one fell swoop the Court was able to deny an already passed law based purely on their judgement of the Constitution, so it’s important to note how their judgements fell into distinct groups. The decision was split definitively across ideological lines, with the five liberal justices voting as the majority. This split makes it hard to believe that their decisions were

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