Friday, June 27, 2014

Courts Making The Jobs of Public Servants Impossible

Thinking as I was weeding,  remembering how my family members who are and were public school teachers have chaffed under the idiotic requirements imposed on them, in their classrooms, by judges and justices, many of whom never, once, attended a public school,  thinking about the breezy insouciance of the declarations of how easy it is for the police to pick out potential mass murderers and even single murderers and assailants from a crowd of angry fanatics, I though about how these court rulings make the professions of public servants impossible for anyone who has good intentions and a sense of responsibility.   If I'd been closer to the members of my family who have been policemen - Somehow, I doubt that most of the Supremes could name members of their family who had been policemen, they don't usually come from that class of people.  - I bet I'd have heard similar issues aside from those which are reasonable requirements, reminding those arrested of their rights, the need to get a search warrant to search. It's as if the Supreme Court doesn't even care about the real-life working lives of real people doing jobs that can be anything from difficult to life threatening.   And by virtue of rulings that require that even dangerously violent, mentally ill kids be given equal access to a regular public school classroom, many times kids far bigger than the mostly women in that profession, AND ITS GUN RULINGS, teaching has become a job that often carries dangers that were once associated with policing.

I have known lots of people who tried teaching, found that teaching is impossible in all too many public schools and who gave it up for a better paid profession.  I've even heard one person who went from teaching to being a policeman and saying he was less fearful being a cop than he was in his classroom.   One person I heard gave up teaching when he was attacked by an habitually disruptive student who almost blinded him in one eye AND HE WAS THE ONE WHO GOT INTO TROUBLE FOR NOT KEEPING ORDER IN HIS CLASSROOM.   He found the life of a subway conductor to be a better use of his talents.   

I would like for lawyers, all of them, including the corporate lawyers from whom most of the judges and "justices" of courts are chosen, and also the academic lawyers who account for most of the others, to have to live with the real life consequences of their own rulings.   While defense lawyers have an obligation to get their clients the justice due them, a lot of them go a lot farther than that, using everything available to them to get even clients they know are guilty off with no restrictions on them at all.  A lot of lawyers who take cases of clients who want to assert that they or, frequently, their bratty kid has a case to make against what was, clearly, a reasonable effort by teachers or school administrators or the police to keep order or even to protect other people from being violently attacked, go home to their comfortable and expensive homes and their offices removed from their clients' violence and disruptions.  Judges, so often, believe that kind of safe cocoon that they lived in before they were judges is the real world.  There are exceptions, of course, quite a few judges, lawyers and others practice a quite different set of standards for members of racial or other minority groups.  I will acknowledge that the greatest permissions are almost always granted to rich, white people, parents, children etc.   "Justice" Alito's documented rulings on strip searches on poor children as opposed to rich adults, brought out during his confirmation by Professor Ronald S. Sullivan,  is a shameful piece of evidence of that.  Oddly, it doesn't seem to have lost him the nomination fight.  For which Democrats on the repulsive Senate Judiciary Committee share a large part of the responsibility. 

While electing judges brings a horror show in itself, so does giving them lifetime tenure with no, real requirements on them.   Scalia's and Thomas's serial instances of conflict of interest are illustrative of that.   But the real life of us all, living under their rulings, even the rulings of the liberals in that Olympian body are making civil service and the civil life that it exists to serve impossible.   I don't think anything short of forcing judges, justices, lawyers, and the entire legal profession be subjected to the results of their rulings and professional activities would do it.   

I think the rulings they make are one of the reasons that it is hard to attract and keep many good people who would like to go into teaching, policing and other fields who would be good at it.  I think they account for why so many people leave those professions for something that doesn't serve the public good.  I think they account for a lot of the burnout and discouragement, if not cynicism and even criminal conduct and violation of civil rights within those professions.  And, frankly, I think the judges, justices and lawyers, so many of them insulated from the real world result of their work, don't care.  Perhaps we need to get better judges and to get rid of the ones who don't care.   Getting rid of the politicians who appoint them and rubber stamp them is our job.

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