Tag: The Supreme Court

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Happy Independence Day

July 4, 2024

    No group of people have been more aware of the chasm between this country’s professed ideals and its ugly reality than Black Americans.  We know that many Americans define “freedom” as the freedom to exploit and harm others without consequence in pursuit of their selfish goals.  We know that American prosperity was built on the backs of our ancestors’ forced labor on land stolen from indigenous Americans. Yet we held out hope that we could use the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence as a cudgel to prod this country into recognizing that all people are “created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

     It was far from an inevitable march towards greater freedom and equality.  At every turn, progress by Black Americans was met with violent backlash, requiring us to gain, lose and regain the same rights that white Americans take for granted-  the right to vote, the right to a public education, the right to a job and the equal right to buy or rent a home and not to be blocked by the color of our skin.

     History is replete with examples of the viciousness that meets Black achievement, but rather than reckon with that history, those in power seek to erase it.  We have long warned those moderates who sit on the sidelines, unwilling to disturb the status quo, for fear of losing some unearned advantage, that the forces coming for us are greedy and won’t be satisfied with cementing Black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy.  These forces won’t stop until they have rolled back all of the gains of the last century, relegating all nonwhite people, all women and all LGBTQ people to powerless, disfavored status and leaving everyone without obscene wealth to lead “miserable lives of quiet desperation.”  

       As we know, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Just as Reconstruction begat Jim Crow, the backlash to eight years of a Barack Obama presidency was swift and brutal.  In 2016, Americans elected Barack Obama’s polar opposite— an incurious, insecure and corrupt vulgarian.  It was as if America plucked its lottery-winning racist grandpa from the American Legion bingo hall and installed him in the Oval Office.

     The results were as awful as many of us predicted.  From the child separation policy to his disastrous Covid response, Trump’s presidency caused real suffering and death.  Yet his most harmful legacy was his installation of three Supreme Court justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, creating a right wing wrecking ball empowered to eviscerate every law or policy that tried to level the playing field and create a more perfect union.

      Not satisfied with stripping bodily autonomy from all women two years ago in Dobbs, or cutting off ladders of opportunity for Black, Brown and indigenous students in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, this term the rogue right wing majority arrogated more power for itself than at any point since it decided Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

     First, in Loper Bright v, Raimondo, the Supreme Court struck down the 40 year old precedent of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, kneecapping federal agencies by eliminating the requirement that “if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute,” courts were required to “uphold the agency’s interpretation of a statute, as long as it as reasonable,” (Source: “ Supreme Court strikes down Chevron, curtailing power of federal agencies,” by Amy Howe, SCOTUSblog.com, 6/28/24).  After Loper Bright, six unelected zealots will be the ultimate arbiter of highly technical decisions that require specialized knowledge, despite not knowing the difference between nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, and nitrogen oxide, a pollutant regulated by the EPA.

     The worst and most consequential decision of the Term was handed down on Monday.  A mere three days ago, on the eve of the day the nation celebrates its independence from the British monarchy, the Court issued an opinion granting Trump 

partial immunity in the January 6th cases, holding that former presidents “can never be prosecuted for actions related to the core powers of their office,” and that they enjoy presumptive “immunity for their official acts,” (Source:  

“Justices rule Trump has some immunity from prosecution,” by Amy Howe, SCOTUSblog.com, 7/1/24).  As Justice Sotomayor pointed out in her scathing dissent, “no matter how you look at it, the majority’s official-acts immunity is utterly  indefensible.”  This decision exposes the right’s long vaunted veneration of originalism as nothing more than a convenient way to deny rights to anyone who was outside of the scope of the law’s protection in 1776.

        The decision is even more frightening when combined with the Heritage Foundation’s 900 page blueprint for the next Presidential administration. Project 2025 calls for the replacement of career civil servants with MAGA loyalists, the elimination of reproductive freedom for women, rights for LGBTQ people and any mention of diversity, equity and inclusion, (Source:  “Project 2025:  The Trump presidency wish list explained,” by Mike Wendling, BBC.com, 7/3/24). Make no mistake, the goal of Republicans is to make this country a “post-Constitutionalist” Christofascist hellscape for anyone who is not a straight, white, Christian man.

     Today, let us declare our independence from the thinking that women’s rights don’t affect men, that  LGBTQ rights don’t matter to straight  people, that stripping civil rights from Black people doesn’t affect white people.  The last eight years has shown us that they won’t stop.  Neither should we.  We need to mobilize, organize and vote like our lives depend on it—- because they do. Happy Independence Day! 

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Supreme Corruption

June 22, 2024

    Our country has become a sinkhole of corruption, full of people chasing the fever dream of white supremacy.  Our Congress is paralyzed by a small cadre of attention-seeking arsonists sent to Washington from gerrymandered districts stuffed with bitter voters whose minds are curdled by hate.

     The most prominent example, though, is the Supreme Court. The only thing that outstrips the craven corruption of JusticesThomas and Alito is the aggressive mediocrity of their intellect.  The two are in a cynical contest to see who can fetch the highest price for their fealty, while Justice Roberts is like a dejected ringmaster who has lost control of the circus.  It is the entirely predictable result of allowing dark money into politics through its 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) and supercharging the disenfranchisement of Black and Brown voters in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013).

     How else can we explain last week’s decision written by Thomas for the 6-3 majority in Garland v. Cargill?  The decision overturned a Trump-era rule banning bump stocks,a device that renders semi-automatic weapons capable of firing 400 or 500 shots at a time without having to re-engage the trigger.  The 19 page majority opinion used “six diagrams” of the internal firing mechanism of guns with bump stock devices, to substitute a tortured argument centered on the “function of the trigger,” to achieve their desired result— to legalize bump stocks, (Source:  Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. ___, dissent of Sotomayor, J. at 7).

     Justice Sotomayor’s dissent argued for a humane and common sense interpretation of the BATF regulation, stating that by “focusing on the internal mechanisms that initiate fire…the majority eviscerates Congress’s regulation of machine guns and enables gun users and manufacturers to circumvent federal law,” (Cargill, 602 U.S. ___, dissent of Sotomayor, J.at 7).  As Justice Sotomayor pointed out, the majority’s approach “flies in the face of this Court’s standard tools of statutory interpretation,” (ibid).  

     The decision in Garland v, Cargill, which will inexorably lead to deadlier mass shootings, is in line with the conservative supermajority’s effort to jettison reliance on legal precedent and substitute 19th century “history and tradition.”  This doctrinal shift seeks to erase modernity and hamstring the law by limiting protections to those in place well before anyone other than straight, Christian, white men had rights that “the law was bound to respect.”   Thomas doubled down on this hidebound judicial philosophy in his lone dissent in the 8-1 decision in United States v. Rahimi, which upheld the constitutionality of a law which strips guns from domestic abusers.

     It is no surprise that this approach is led by Alito and Thomas, the two most corrupt and least intellectually serious justices on the Court.  Neither man makes any secret of their extreme right wing views and Alito, in particular, seems to relish flaunting them.  After Alito was exposed for having two insurrectionist flags flying on his property (one for each home), he was caught on tape enthusiastically agreeing with journalist Lauren Windsor’s statement that “people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting…to return our country to a place of godliness,” (Source: “Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle For America ‘Can’t Be Compromised’,” by Tessa Stuart, Tim Dickinson, Rollingstone.com, 6/10/24).  Yet despite these shocking disclosures, Alito has rebuffed all calls that he recuse himself from the January 6th case.

     Clarence Thomas seems determined to beat Alito in the race to the bottom.  We have known for more than two years that Thomas’s wife Ginni played a key role in the January 6th insurrection, pleading with Mark Meadows via text to keep Trump from conceding the election and lobbying legislators in Wisconsin to install a slate of fake electors (Source:  “Ginni Thomas pressed Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory,” by Emma Brown, The Washington Post, 9/1/22).  In addition, thanks to ProPublica, we know that for twenty years billionaire Harlan Crow has showered Thomas with lavish vacations and private jet trips, as well as paying private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew and even buying Thomas’s mother’s house! (Source:  “Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition,” by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica.com, 5/14/23).

     The combination of blatant corruption and naked extremism is shocking to those of us who grew up shaped by the legacy of the Warren Court.  The Warren Court, which lasted from 1953-1969, is rightly revered for harnessing the law to eradicate segregation (Brown v. Board of Education, (1954)),  to enshrine fairness and due process for criminal defendants, (Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), and Miranda v. Arizona, (1966)), and to establish the marital and personal right of privacy in Griswold v.Connecticut, (1965) that was the foundation for the right to birth control, abortion and overturning the sodomy laws that criminalized sex for LGBTQ people.

    Yet we would do well to remember that the Warren Court was an anomaly. From Dred Scott  to Plessy v. Ferguson to the 1935 “Black Monday” cases invalidating important New Deal policies, for most of its 234 year history the Supreme Court has protected the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the working or  marginalized person.  The corruption is new, but the alignment of interest is not.  Now is a critical time for us to realize, neither the cavalry, nor the Supreme Court, is going to save us.  We are the only ones who can do that.

#VOTE

#ORGANIZE

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Tick, tick…boom

December 6, 2021

     Baby-faced killers, banned books and forced birth.  As the news of the last week makes clear, this is the future that awaits if we don’t remove extremists from power.  Last Tuesday there was another harrowing school shooting in Oxford, Michigan.  The initial facts were devastating enough— a 15 year old armed with a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun, spraying 15 shots in five minutes, killing four beloved young people, injuring seven others and traumatizing countless more, (Source: “Key moments surrounding Michigan high school shooting,” by the Associated Press, APnews.com, 12/5/21).

      As the week wore on, the story only became more bizarre. We learned that the killer’s parents had purchased the murder weapon for him as an early Christmas gift at a Black Friday sale (Source:  ibid).  America has become a place where merchants of death tempt the violent with discounts on instruments of mass murder; where some parents’ twisted idea of love is to gift those guns to a child.

     When a visibly angry prosecutor announced that she planned not only to treat Ethan Crumbley like a Black child and charge him as an adult, but to charge his parents as well, the parents drained their bank account and skipped town. They fled to Detroit, no doubt imagining either that they could sneak across the river to Canada, or that the Black city was such a hotbed of criminality that no one would find them.  Instead they were captured late Friday night cowering in an empty commercial building (Source: “Dramatic Day Reveals Details About the Parents of a School Shooting Suspect,” by Sophie Kasakove and Susan Cooper Eastman, The New York Times, 12/5/21).  From our country’s steadfast refusal to regulate civilian ownership of weapons of war to the spectacle of parents who gleefully arm their troubled children and then abandon those children at the first whiff of accountability, the stench of American rot is inescapable.

      Stench, as Justice Sotomayor noted, was the only way to describe the odor from the contemptuous sophistry displayed by the six conservative Justices during Wednesday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.  Justice Kavanaugh cynically cited landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefells v. Hodges to disingenuously dismiss the argument that the Court should be bound by a precedent that has guaranteed women bodily autonomy for 50 years (Source:  “Majority of the court appears poised to roll back abortion rights,” by Amy Howe, Scotusblog.com,12/1/21).

      Amy Coney “Aunt Lydia” Barrett blithely ignored the fact that pregnancy itself carries serious medical risks and that the maternal mortality rate of Black women is  2.5 times that of white women, asking whether the “‘safe haven’ laws which allow parents to give up their newborns at designated safe places,” could serve as a substitute for women’s right to control their own bodies, (ibid).

     Chief Justice John Roberts, whose radicalism is tempered by his concern for the Court’s legitimacy, zeroed in on the viability standard in Roe v. Wade, asking why 15 weeks was not a sufficient amount of time for women to exercise reproductive choice, (ibid).

      While the high court’s conservatives were salivating over the prospect of giving the government control over the bodies of America’s women, in state after state Republicans were working feverishly to gain control of the minds of America’s kids.  From Texas to Virginia to Pennsylvania, rabid conservatives seek to ban authors from Toni Morrison to Alison Bechdel.   Radical conservatives are calling for the offending books to be burned and seek nothing less than the erasure of any knowledge of racism, Black history or the existence of LGBTQ people, (Source:  “U.S. libraries report spike in organized attempt to ban books in schools,” by Allison Flood, the guardian.com, 11/25/21).

       This is the current state of our country— awash in violence, ignorance and cruelty, full of people who seek to extinguish or erase anyone who is “different.”  Yet, like stubborn surfers, we mistake the preternatural calm before a tsunami for a permanent state.  We stand still at our own peril, thinking we won’t be drowned by the wave.  

#PasstheWomen’sHealthProtectionAct

#Eliminatethefilibuster 

#PasstheFreedomtoVoteAct

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Bringing a knife to a gunfight

May 22, 2021

     It was much easier to combat evil when Trump was President.  It was easy to mobilize and fight against a crass vulgarian who wore his racism and corruption on his sleeve.  Biden is like Trump’s photo negative.  He’s an old, straight white man who exudes empathy, who craves connection rather than cruelty.  His comforting persona is what has allowed him to propose progressive policies that combine the economic populism of F.D.R. and the racial justice of LBJ.

     Yet the adherence to tradition that makes Biden a non threatening vessel for radical change risks making that change impossible.  Biden’s promise— that he can save democracy, lessen inequality and solve systemic racism—is sure to be broken if he insists on relying on hidebound traditions and outmoded procedures at a time when the other major political party is resorting to violence and lies in its pursuit of white nationalist power. All over the country, Republican leaders are turning their states into laboratories for autocracy, stripping their residents of Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

      Abortion rights are a prime example.  In the last week of April alone, 28 abortion restrictions were signed into law in states around the country. Several of the laws are drafted with the express purpose of giving the Supreme Court the opportunity to reverse Roe v.Wade,or to weaken it so severely that it becomes meaningless, (Source:  “A Guide to Abortion Laws By State,”by Kaia Hubbard, USNews.com, 4/29/21).  From Arizona and Indiana to Texas’ execrable fetal heartbeat bill signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott three days ago, these statutes treat women as nothing more than vessels for the continuation of the species, with zero agency or autonomy over their own lives or health.

       Just this week, the Supreme Court decided to hear a challenge to Mississippi’s restrictive ban on abortion after 15 weeks, despite the fact that there was no disagreement in the  lower courts, which all found the statute unconstitutional.  The Mississippi statute at issue was patterned after model legislation drafted by the radical anti-choice group, Alliance Defending Freedom, whose mission is to “eradicate Roe v. Wade.”. Amy Coney Barrett was a featured speaker at the Alliance’s summer fellowship program five times, starting in 2011.  The summer program’s stated goal is “to teach students ‘how God can use them as judges, law professors and practicing attorneys to help….the spread of the Gospel in America,” (Source:  “A perilous new era,” by Judd Legum,popularinfo.com, 5/18/21).  That mission explicitly contradicts the First Amendment of the Constitution that Justice Coney Barrett took an oath to uphold.  Sadly, that is not surprising.

      This Supreme Court is far from the august body that validated the civil rights of Black people in decisions like Brown v. Board, or women’s right to reproductive freedom in decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut  and Roe v. Wade.  This is a court dominated by right wing ideologues who are consumed with a desire to remake society to serve the needs of oligarchs and theocrats.  Fully half of the current 6-3 conservative majority do not have a legitimate claim to their place on the court.  Trump was only able to appoint Neil Gorsuch because Mitch McConnell denied a hearing to Obama nominee, Merrick Garland, holding the seat open for the entire remainder of Obama’s presidency, although Scalia died nine months before Election Day in 2016.  Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed despite credible claims of sexual assault which were whitewashed in a cursory investigation.  But the most egregious of all was the replacement of feminist icon Ruth Badger Ginsburg with her polar opposite, a simpering Stepford wife committed to promoting “a distinctly Christian worldview in every area of the law.”

      The excesses of this far-right supermajority can’t be curbed with a commission.  We can’t sacrifice the voting rights of 125 million BIPOC Americans out of fealty to the filibuster.  We can’t jeopardize our desperately needed infrastructure improvements chasing the chimera of bipartisanship.  In short, we can’t bring a knife to the gunfight for our democracy.  It will end up dead.