Blog post 2- Supreme Court

      

        The Supreme Court was established in 1789 due to Article Three of the US Constitution. The significance of their decisions is crucial since they have ultimate jurisdiction over all laws inside of the United States. The court is composed of 9 justices whose job is to make sure the power isn’t lopsided of the two other branches of government, being the executive and legislative powers. 

The Supreme Court’s justices are nominated to their position exclusively by the President of the United States and then confirmed or denied by the US Senate. The first Supreme Court was composed of Chief Justice John Jay, John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison, and James Wilson. John Jay has the responsibilities’ of conducting the Supreme Court and sets the agenda for weekly meetings for the judges. When the majority opinion is included in the Chief Justice’s thoughts (in agreement), then the justice is allowed to choose who will write the court’s overall opinion. The Chief Justice determines the trials of impeachment of the President of the United States, for example President Johnson and Clinton, who were impeached and acquitted. 

There have been plenty of cases that have held high significance and have had major effects on the people of the United States. Cases involving civil rights like Plessy v Ferguson and Dred Scott vs Sandford show the impacts of denying citizenship and upholding segregation laws on African American slaves in the 1800s. Another popular case decided by the SCOTUS is Roe v Wade, where in 1973, it was ruled that women are allowed to choose if they can have an abortion during the first two trimesters. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWRoXYRsaeo&feature=youtu.be

5 News Sources

 

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TheWeatherChannel

Every morning when I wake up, I have made it a routine to check the weather forecast for the day and the coming week. Instead of using the weather app on the iPhone, I like to use TheWeatherChannel since it is more accurate and gives an actual live forecast you can follow. In High Point, it rains a lot so checking the times of the rain scatter is a great tool I use while going in between classes. 

https://weather.com/

BBC News

I enjoy using this site because it is British, which gives you a different perspective on the news occurring in the world. An interesting term, ethnocentrism, which is the tendency to look at the world from one’s own culture, is something that comes to mind when thinking about this news channel. Americans believe that they are in the center of the world and tend to think to this idea. This site allows you to read about news going on in the world, and the US from a ‘outside’ point of view. 

https://www.bbc.com/news

Associated Press (AP)

The tagline that is used on the front and center of this site is ‘advancing the power of facts.” The writing of articles tends to be as neutral as possible. AP tends to be the site that fact checks and confirms whether stories on other news sources are legit or fake. Associated Press is kind of like the ‘control group’ of the news sources. 

https://apnews.com/

CBS News

According to a 2014 research study, 40% of articles posted on CBS are left leaning while 20% tend to be leaning on the right wing of the political spectrum. Technically, this would be a biased news source, but CBS is actually more center aligned than stations like CNN, Fox, and ABC. While reading articles from CBS, I like to find similar articles on the same topic on Google to see the validity of the news. Overall, this is a solid source to get news like controversial issues since they tend to write in the tone of neutrality. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/

Twitter

Twitter defiantly gets a bad wrap when relating to the news, however it is warranted. There are plenty of bots, fake accounts, and plenty of fake news located on this social media site. The reason I enjoy using Twitter is because I am on it a lot, and that it is very quick when breaking news stories. These stories aren’t true all the time, but it allows me to find out about a story first and are able to look up the validity of the story on other news sources. 

twitter.com