I can't shake the feeling the Court is Congress reaping what it has sown [View all]

[Sympthsical]

For at least forty years, Congress has again and again thrown to the courts and other areas what they themselves probably should have been managing.

Think of how many advances we've made as a society that never made it through Congress but were instead tossed at the courts to or federal agencies to deal with. Reproductive freedom. LGBT rights. Climate change policy.

Once the Court well and truly flipped and started deciding, "Not our job. Not the EPAs job. It's Congress' job," there's chaos.

Codifying those things we want to keep into tangible law rather than relying on the vacillating interpretations of five people is something we should have been doing all along. But there is forever an election on the horizon. Stop me if you've heard this. "Now's not the time, because the election is 12, 9, 6, 3 months away . . ."

I'm not agreeing with the Court's recent rulings - far from. I am, however, suggesting that how our political system functions and how much we as voters and partisan actors have indulged it for so long was leading to this kind of inevitability.

Congress has sacrificed many of its roles and functions to the executive and judicial branches over the past 50 years. What we're seeing now can be directly traced to it. When we left our basic liberal advances in the hands of a few, we imperiled their lasting power.

Maybe it's time to stop writing everything on a political dry erase board and start doing things more concretely. Our representatives need to start taking stands and doing the work even if it makes their Novembers more difficult.

Just my thinking at the moment.