American democracy has been the envy of most of the world for more than 230 years. Whatever errors our country may have committed, the checks and balances our Constitution has provided between Congress, the president and the Supreme Court have served Americans well.

There have been challenges, of course. America faces a huge one of those now. That’s whether the Supreme Court will retain some pretense of independence or enter politics openly.

That the justices of the Supreme Court can be political is not news. They are people first and justices-for-life second.

A glance at a few decisions the court has handed down reveals how very human the justices can be. They allowed a president to unconstitutionally put about 80,000 U.S. citizens and over 40,000 legal immigrants in the U.S. in concentration camps with the stroke of a pen in 1942.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was, of course, responding to public hysteria over the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 80 years ago this month. Apparently the Supreme Court was caught up in that panic.

It took almost three years for the justices to reverse themselves. In late 1944, they let Roosevelt know of their decision in advance so he could announce ahead of news of the court ruling that he was freeing the Japanese-Americans he’d wrongly imprisoned in Idaho and elsewhere.

In 1896, the court effectively ruled that racial segregation was legal. Many decisions since have weakened that ruling. We take it for granted today that discrimination on the basis of skin color is criminal. Supreme Court justices, however, have never specifically overturned the 1896 decision.

In 1857, the court ruled that no law could be passed that either freed American slaves or let them become citizens. According to many legal scholars, that “Dred Scott” decision was the court’s worst ruling ever.

That’s because it effectively prohibited any political resolution of the conflict between American states at the time over slavery. Less than three years after the Dred Scott decision was handed down, the Civil War started. More than one in every 40 Americans alive at the time died in the conflict.

It’s possible to go on, but you get the idea. Well armed as we are today with 20-20 hindsight, we can see clearly our Supreme Court justices are capable of human failures.

Will they fail again when they’re called upon by our immediate past-president to stop Congress from seeing White House records of his communications and movements during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot? The National Archives has the records. A federal appeals court ruled this week Congress should see the records. The last president is certain to appeal.

He says his records are protected by “executive privilege.” He had every legal right to assert that privilege while he was in office.

However, he’s not in office now. The president who is in office says Congress should see the records. He directed the National Archives to release them to a committee investigating the riot. A lawsuit by the ex-president stopped the release.

There’s nothing specifically written into law that says what should happen next. There is no legal precedent to rely on in this case, either.

How the Supreme Court rules here doesn’t just matter to the ex-president. It will give us a glimpse of rulings that may be far more important.

Suits over the immoral gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts by our two major political parties will likely be appealed to the court next year. Also on the horizon are appeals of voter suppression laws being passed wholesale by Republican legislators across the country.

How openly political the justices are willing to be on the archived president’s records should tell us much about how far they’re willing to go on other current matters.

Dave Finkelnburg is a long-time Idahoan, a former newspaper journalist, and is currently semi-retired from an engineering career.