Our culture, our political system, our media all accept that five members of the Supreme Court of the United States can base a legal ruling on a blatant lie about a law passed by The Congress, one that is obvious in the record, as Justice Ginsburg brilliantly documented AND THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE NO ONE CAN CALL THEM ON THAT LIE. The media, the only effective counter to that won't because they're invested in the system that lets them get away with it. The media will carry The Five Lying Justices polluted water for them and so The People won't be roused to vote out the elected arm of their party. If anyone proposed impeaching them for things such as blatant conflict of interest, the media would go berserk opposing it. The media are the ones who sold the absurd notion that The Supremes are some kind of infallible oracle due an absurd deference and respect that is incompatible with limits on power*. The Congress won't do much to reign them, certainly not as long as the Republican have an effective veto on any measure that will punish their lying.
As any human creation, including corporations, our form of government, under that idol, The Constitution, has flaws which can become dangerous. There is a story that when he was ready to take the test to become a citizen of the United States, the greatest logician of the age, Kurt Gödel, got his friends worried in a big way because he said he had located a logical flaw in The Constitution that would lead to the country becoming a fascist state. They are said to have enlisted his friend Albert Einstein to talk to him. They figured that the rather innocently honest Gödel was quite capable of getting himself flunked out of the country by being too honest about that, if asked. Apparently he wasn't as he became a citizen. When I first heard the story I wondered what it was he had found and wished I could find out. With the experience of the unbridled power of the Rehnquist and Roberts courts I can easily imagine it was in the judiciary clauses that the fatal flaw was found, though I'm surprised he could only find one.
But, I'm forgetting, that was an age when there was some vestigial respect for the truth, that the society still had notions of honor and honesty, of morality and moral obligations, which everything, in the end relies on. The reliance on those things would have been taken as givens at the time, they can't be taken as givens now.
The Five Liars of the Hobby Lobby case will be allowed to get away with their lies because there is no mechanism in the structure of the government to punish Supreme Court lying. They can't be voted out and they won't be impeached for lying on the bench. Perhaps an amendment that makes lying in a Supreme Court ruling an impeachable offense might make some impression, though not as long as we've got the Republicans we've got in the Congress and the Senate.
The fault, though, lies in Us, The People, in those weaknesses of ours that are taken advantage of by anyone who wants to sell us anything, dishonestly. And what is needed is probably exactly the opposite of what this ruling will lead to, a deeper and more widespread belief that lying is a serious sin, bearing false witness is a far more serious one and that leaders and judges who lie are an evil that must be expunged in order to avoid disaster. And that is an idea that is at odds with modernism in the degraded form which has taken, largely through the mass media that is corrupted through the permission to sell itself to the biggest spender.
* Here is what I said in the wake of the appointments of Roberts and Alito, the man who issued the lying document.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
EVERYONE IN THE ROOM KNEW THEY WERE LYING
Molly Ivins' most enduring statement might turn out to be her observation that everyone in Washington DC ends up saying the same things. One of the same things today is that the Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court Justices have become a Kabuki dance. What do you think the chances are that even three of the parrots of the DC press corps knows anything about the high art of Kabuki? Given that within the past year we have been witness to two of these shows and what those were like I'd like to suggest we pass up the obvious "theater of the absurd" designation and go straight to "charades".
But charades isn't the right word either. In charades while the player says nothing they make gestures that are designed to get the audience to say what the player is thinking. In these hearings there were a flood of words and few gestures, give or take a staged bout of tears, and the exercise was to make the audience NOT say what everyone in the room and beyond knew was the subject of the play.
Roberts and Alito lied every single time they verbally mimed the pose of not having made up their minds before hearing a case. These kobe cattle were bred and hand raised to provide the most predictable results. They were nominated into the entirely predictable and safe Republican hands to be put on the court to join Scalia and Thomas to gut the Bill of Rights and Civil Rights amendments and to continue the Republican handover of the country to the oligarches and their corporate properties.
Everyone in the room knew they were lying. Such press as had any knowledge of the Court and things judicial knew they were lying though I'm prepared to conceed that the cabloid clack might not have even known what the Court was. The large majority of us who listened to the entire farce knew they were lying. And now the lies will continue as they do exactly what everyone knew they would do. The very rare times that one of them has a bit of a woozy stomach and does something slightly unpredictable will be held onto like a life raft to prove the myth of judicial independence but that won't happen very often.
The lesson for the left is that Earl Warren is dead. He's been dead a good long while now. We can stop pretending that the Supreme Court is going to be anything but the hand maiden of the corporate oligarchy. If we are going to fight this its going to be through the ballot and if not there God save us.
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