Justice & Law Quote by Judy Biggert

There’s a quiet absolutism tucked into Biggert’s phrasing: “final arbiter” sounds like civics-class common sense, but it’s also a bid to freeze a messy constitutional ecosystem into a single, clean hierarchy. The Supreme Court already sits atop the federal judiciary. So why insist on it? Because the line isn’t really descriptive; it’s performative. It signals deference to institutional authority while staking out a position in the long-running fight over who gets to interpret the Constitution when the stakes are high and the politics are ugly.

The specific intent reads like reassurance: in an era when “activist judges” and “runaway courts” are standard partisan alarms, Biggert frames the Court as the stabilizing endpoint, the place where disputes stop. That’s calming rhetoric for voters exhausted by constant conflict. But the subtext is more strategic. Elevating the Court as the “final” voice can be a way to legitimize outcomes your coalition expects to like (or to launder responsibility when you don’t: Congress can shrug and say, the Court has spoken). It also flattens the constitutional reality that federal questions get “answered” across branches and levels of government every day through legislation, executive action, agency interpretation, and lower-court rulings.

Context matters: politicians reach for judicial finality most often when federal power, civil rights, and culture-war issues are in play. The quote borrows the aura of rule-of-law neutrality while quietly choosing a referee in a game where the referees are also appointed by the players.