Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I agree with you. And I think it's really easy when you are operating from a position of fear. In some cases, a fear for their own safety, a fear for their own livelihood, their way of life or their religious whatever. They feel like, well, you know, sometimes that's the way it works. They don't
extend that idea to its logical conclusion that sometimes in a system run by fallible humans it does mean that guilty people will walk free but that we have to err on the side of not incarcerating or putting to death somebody who there's even a small chance of being innocent when push comes to shove and it's your own family and it's your own community people have a really hard time well we're
Yeah. Yeah.
It's your normal human instinct to be like, you should no longer walk the earth if you did that to my children. And that is why we can't have laws based on our base instincts. Yeah, exactly. That is why we need to have laws that are principled and not based on the emotional anger that somebody feels in a given moment.
Exactly. It's a lot of arrogance. I think you're right.
Yeah, I mean, it is true that they're not supposed to be making decisions based on what is popular, which is what politicians often do. They make decisions that will help them get reelected as opposed to principled decisions. So, yes, that's the idea.
behind it that we are removed from public opinion that's why the members of the Supreme Court have lifetime appointments and so there's almost always a gap between what happens theoretically and what happens on the ground right theoretically it insulates you from popular opinion so that you only make principle decisions
What it can also mean is that it allows people who potentially are corrupt or people who potentially are not playing by the rules, it allows them to stay in power excessively because it's too difficult to get rid of them. So there's always a give and take when it comes to these issues. Yes, it's a good idea in theory, but in reality, it means the following things.
But you're right that there's meant to be a lack of reactivity to public opinion on the part of the court system. And sometimes a court gets it wrong.
Sometimes a court has gotten it wrong. They got it real wrong when it came to Plessy v. Ferguson saying that African-Americans were not citizens of the United States, even if they were born here. They got it real wrong in the Korematsu case, which is what found it constitutionally permissible to incarcerate Japanese-Americans. The Supreme Court actually said it was fine that they did that.
So you can look back and point to a variety of cases where you're like, oh, hell no, that is messed up.
That's so true. You are absolutely right that if you are taking a principled look at this, if you dislike the conservative bent of the court today and you feel like, oh, it's just become so political. Oh, my gosh. And Shane making so many decisions that impact some of people's lives. Then you are feeling exactly how conservatives felt during the 1950s and 60s, where they're like, what the?
F is this cart. And they felt like the court was radically reshaping American society during the 1950s. And they were. We just today feel like they were reshaping it in the right way.
To be fair, they were reshaping. in the right way. You know, like segregation was not acceptable. It's not okay. So it's easy for us to look back on that today and be like, yes, sometimes the court should radically reshape society because lawmakers who are concerned with consolidating and maintaining their own power care more about that than about doing the right thing.
Or lawmakers are themselves bigots. But then we feel really uncomfortable if the same principle is extended to its logical conclusion. And it means that sometimes the court swings to the right.
I totally agree with you. Principle over party. That's how I say it. The principles of democracy are more important than any party allegiance to somebody might have.
Jax, you're right. You are correct.
It is both a democracy and a republic. A republic is a structure of government. A democracy is a government of the people. That's literally what the word means in Greek. And there are different ways to structure democracies, direct democracies, constitutional republics, a variety of different kinds. You can have a figurehead like a monarch in like they do in England. We don't have that here.
But yet the UK is still a democracy. So there's more than one way to structure a democratic government. But democracy just means government of the people. And this far right talking point about like, it's not a democracy, it's a republic. My question to you is like, and what is your point? Their point is that they're repeating a far right talking point from the 1950s. Oh, that starts in the 50s?
Yes, in the 1950s.
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