Letter from Ashok Malhotra

Judges Should Remain Impartial

I thought with amazement when I heard the news that the Supreme Court of the USA, with a majority ruling, said that the president of the USA is above the law and could not be prosecuted if he/she was performing his/her official duty. Judges who passed that law of the land with a majority of six were appointed by the conservative presidents. Though they should be impartial to the ideology of who nominated them, they were not. In this case, all six of them were representing the presidents who nominated them in the first place.

They are passing the law of the land by putting the president of the USA above the law. They are deciding the fate of the nation which is proud of the fact that it provided the world the first taste of a democratic republic that the world had ever seen. Now the six of them have become dictators by telling 330 million or more people that they could put anybody above the law if he/she is elected as the president of the USA.

As the Turkish proverb says, “When a joker lives in the palace, he does not become the king but the whole palace becomes a circus.”

Our democracy, which used to be the envy of the people of the world, is becoming a joke and a circus. This is what our forefathers who painstakingly constructed the constitution did not want to happen. How painful it would be for them to come back and see how some members of the Supreme Court of the USA have forgotten their ethics and are doing their biddings to pay back their debts. Abernathy, who was running for president of the USA, once said about President Nixon: “President Nixon wanted the crime off the streets of the USA so that he could bring it back to the White House.” How true his saying is.

The USA is a democratic republic where the “will” of its citizens should be supreme. Let’s limit the term of the Supreme Court justices to eight years, like the presidents of the USA. Secondly, let’s increase the Supreme Court from nine justices to 11. It might work if the justices are elected by the people rather than being nominated by the presidents to represent their ideologies.

Ashok Malhotra
Oneonta