I posted this a few years back and liked it so much I posted it twice in one week. I listened to it again this morning and still like it. It's been a busy week of listening to my country going to hell so I couldn't look for a new play but this is a really good one.
If you diss the secularly sanctified ACLU you can expect to get flack, flack doesn't much bother me, I use it. I think that those lists given by Sheldon Whitehouse of false fronts in service to the modern Republican-fascist-corporate oligarchy could honestly include a group that helped get them some of their most useful tools in order to do that, the ACLU which has both a long history of championing the "freedom of speech-press" items which first freed the corporate media to lie about Democrats and which directly led to Trump getting enough Electoral College votes to defeat the woman probably lied about in the whole range of media from the bottom of the sewer to the more genteel liars of the New York Times, lied about more and longer than any other Democratic nominee for president, Ted Kennedy probably the best comparison for time, though Ted did give them plenty to work with in his younger days.
The ACLU has been an amicus machine too, and in virtually every single case in which the choice was between getting money out of our politics and letting the oligarchs buy our congresses, our presidency, our courts, the ACLU has sided with the oligarchs in not a dissimlar way to the neo-facist front groups Sheldon Whitehouse exposed so beautifully the other day.
Not only that but in other "free speech" cases, such as in tobacco advertisement, liquor advertisement, ect. they have sided with corporate interests wanting to advertise dangerous addictive, health destroying and life ending products on the public airwaves, promoting the use of and abuse of them. They also had a huge hand in allowing Big Pharma to advertise on TV, something which has become a huge problem in things like the promotion of opioids which have joined tobacco and alcohol as major addiction problems destroying lives and burdening socieity and law enforcement with huge problems.
I know for a fact that when they were exposed by investigative journalists and a former employee for being on the take from the tobacco industry AS THEY WERE WRITING BRIEFS, ETC. ON THEIR BEHALF they threatened to stifle the free speech of the journalists and others who exposed them.
The American Civil Liberties Union has defended the Bill of Rights since its founding in 1920. This proud record does not necessarily mean that the ACLU welcomes an exercise of the First Amendment right of freedom of speech concerning its own affairs. I found this out when I inquired about the Union’s ties to the tobacco industry, basing some of my questions on internal documents.
The reply was astonishing. My questions embodied charges that not only lacked "any basis in fact," but were "false and misleading." So wrote Ira Glasser, the ACLU’s strong-willed Executive Director and de facto boss since 1978. For this grave allegation he offered no evidence. Nevertheless, he warned that were I to repeat the charges in an article, "we will appropriately respond at that time." If this was not an outright threat to sue for libel, it was, lawyers tell me, crafted to be read like one.
The reply was also bizarre. I cannot recall so much as an implicit threat of a libel action during the half-century that I’ve reported, extensively and often, on sensitive subjects, particularly misconduct and criminal conduct by deep-pocket corporations—including tobacco companies. Yet such an apparent threat now has come from the organization that has prided itself, for more than 75 years, on defeating efforts to weaken or circumvent the Bill of Rights.
And as the eminent investigative journalist Morton Mintz discovered, what the ACLU was issuing hush orders on was mild compaired to the scandal of it.
Glasser’s response is rooted in "Allies: The ACLU and the Tobacco Industry," a report I had released in July 1993. "Allies" drew press coverage focusing on the Union’s solicitation and acceptance of $500,000 from Philip Morris, the leading cigarette maker, in the six years 1987 through 1992. But the report raised other significant issues, starting with the ACLU’s conflict-of-interest troika: The Union was at once seeking and taking tobacco money, allying itself with the tobacco industry to oppose (with testimony, press releases and "Dear Senator" letters) legislation intended to ban or restrict tobacco advertising and promotion, and—crucially—failing to mention either activity in the endless stream of "emergency" and "urgent" fundraising letters it sends to its approximately 300, 000 members, its quarterly newsletter, Civil Liberties, and its annual reports.
I began thinking about revisiting the ACLU/tobacco alliance on the spring day in 1994 when the top guns of the tobacco industry raised their right arms at a congressional hearing and swore that they did not believe nicotine to be addictive. There followed a series of developments that convulsed the industry, including Liggett Group’s admissions that it had long known that nicotine is addictive and that cigarette smoking does cause disease; the Food and Drug Administration’s classification of nicotine as a drug and of cigarettes as drug-delivery devices, and the outpouring of internal documents demonstrating that the industry targeted children. But what Finally made me decide to follow up on "Allies" was the publication, in late 1996, of a book in which former Union employee John Fahs exposed a bundle of highly embarrassing internal documents, only to be all but ignored by the media and reviewed nowhere.
In "Allies" I had concluded that the ACLU was untainted by "financial impropriety" and that its integrity was "not the issue." Glasser used these very quotes to enhance the credibility of statements like these, made to inquiring reporters and complaining ACLU members: "There is no quid pro quo;" "none of the grants is for issues directly related to tobacco company interests;" the ACLU "seek[s] support to carry out our agenda and advance our principles; we do not accept money with any condition on it that would require us to bend our principles or carry out an agenda not our own."
The Fahs book—"Cigarette Confidential: The Unfiltered Truth About the Ultimate American Addiction"—persuaded me that I had inadvertently misled my readers. The documents demonstrate, author Fahs declared, that the ACLU undertook work "on behalf of cigarette manufacturers…in direct exchange for funding—a quid pro quo arrangement in direct conflict with the institution’s status as a government-subsidized, tax-exempt, nonprofit institution [emphasis added]." In addition, he alleged, the National Task Force on Civil Liberties in the Workplace, the ACLU unit that advocates "smokers’ rights," "owes more than 90 percent of its annual budget and 100 percent of its continued existence" to grants to the ACLU Foundation by Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Glasser had declined, in a 1992 interview for "Allies," to disclose the amount of the contribution made by the RJR Nabisco unit).
"Philip Morris provides no general contributions to the ACLU, only earmarked money for workplace rights," task force director Lewis L. Maltby told Glasser in a September 1991 memo. But neither in the 1992 interview for "Allies" nor in subsequent damage-control efforts did Glasser so much as hint at earmarking. Rather, he deflected attention from it by emphasizing my own calculation that Philip Morris’s grants amounted to less than one-half of one percent of ACLU revenues. "Tobacco companies are not a major source of support for the ACLU," he said.
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The ACLU has been playing real liberals for suckers for pretty much its entire existence. I have compared its flagship, for show advocacy in court on behalf of this or that person who is an isolated victim of injustice with its more deadly advocacy for "free speech - free press" which has not only fueled the rise of the Republican-fascist right through the corporate media propagandizing the country but has given the fascists on the court the language with which to gut campaign fiance laws that aimed FORMERLY ON A BIPARTISAN BASIS to rescue our politics from the billionaires and milionaires domestic AND EVEN FOREIGN.
I have said the ACLU is like the little boy who stuck his finger in a hole in the dike to stop disaster as he drilled many more holes in the dike with his other hand. And that is its actual role in American politics, in American law and in American life.
I wish I could replevy the money I stupidly donated to them during the years they had me fooled, up through the 1970s, up to their part in the Skokie case in which my eyes ere opened to their con game. It was that case that forced me to realize that these pathologically irresponsible, preening pseudo-liberals thought that we should ignore the history of what the Nazis, the KKK and other ideological groups have done to destroy the rights of far more people and to, in fact, murder them. We are to always, forever let them have another chance to do what we know they can do because they did it in the past, gain power and use it to murder, to oppress, to enslave, people. Though I supposed the clean handed, well appointed members of the ACLU don't have nearly as much to worry in that regard, especially when they are useful to such people as they've been. Count me as one of those who is skeptical that they'd be useful members of the resistance once things got down and dirty. I wouldn't trust them, they'd probably give us away "on principle" don't you know. They'd figure the Nazis, the KKK, the militias "deserved a level playing field," you know, like the billionaires and millionaires get through their advocacy. Yeah, we've all got "free speech" and thanks in no small part to our ACLU our money does too. And like all "equal justice under law" all of the freedom we have with our measly little pile of "free speech" makes it just as illegal for us to sleep under bridges as it does the billionaires and millionaires with their ever so much more "free speech."
I wish the ACLU would threaten me, I'd love to see their devotion to "free speech - free press" in action. Especially if I got to get all of the relevant documents, though I'd never have the means to go through them, I might ask for some help. I'd love to know just who funds them and its relationship with the same dark money. If they're not getting that then they really are too stupid to be trusted with your tiny little donation.
If you think the Supreme Court allowed forms of graft are a minor thing, here even the prissy old drab, the NYT on this hand - on that hand admission that it is a real thing.
When Justice Scalia died two weeks ago, he was staying, again for free, at a West Texas hunting lodge owned by a businessman whose company had recently had a matter before the Supreme Court.
Though that trip has brought new attention to the justice’s penchant for travel, it was in addition to the 258 subsidized trips that he took from 2004 to 2014. Justice Scalia went on at least 23 privately funded trips in 2014 alone to places like Hawaii, Ireland and Switzerland, giving speeches, participating in moot court events or teaching classes. A few weeks before his death, he was in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Many of the justices are frequent expenses-paid travelers, a practice that some court scholars say is a minor matter, given that many of the trips involve public talks that help demystify the court. But others argue that the trips could potentially create the appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly when the organizations are known for their conservative or liberal views. Some groups at times use the presence of a Supreme Court justice as a way to pull in members or other paying guests.
There is far more than an appearance of a conflict of interest. No one with a vestigial mind and a sense of morality would not see this for the scandal it is, you've got to be a trained lawyer-liar to pretend you don't, or a "journalist" such as the kind who write that kind of ass cover to keep them on the side of the oligarchs.
The Supreme Court is a corrupt institution and if you take an honest look at not only the history of what they say - generally how that crooked court is talked about - BUT WHAT THE INTERESTS OF THE MEMBERS OF THE COURT AND THOSE WHO ARE CLOSE TO THEM AND THOSE WHO OPENLY BRIBE THEM, that corruption is florid and started at the very beginning of it. The ante-bellum and gilded-era corruption of Congress is frequently gone over - with good reason, but the Supreme Court which was in thick with thieves with that and our new gilded age corruption is almost never looked at in the same hard way. Which, as Sheldon Whitehouse so pithily noted the other day, is "anomalous," that "the highest court has the lowest standards."
You should be aware that the Federalist fascists are going after Whitehouse, I can guarantee you that their media pals are preparing an attack on him in the way they do whenever someone threatens their corrupt clique with too much truth and honesty.
Amy Coney Barrett's playing of the game of not answering Democrat's questions on the phony and transparent dodge that such things might impinge on cases that the Supreme Court deigns to hear, to the extent that the liar and credentialed "constitutional expert" wouldn't say that Trump can't delay the date of an election or refuse to leave office when his term ends without trying to keep it through violence forces the question of why a candidate for the court can get away with playing that charade when, from what Sheldon Whitehouse revealed about the enormously valuable career help she got from the Federalist Society and two of the other parts of the front group it is, she could accept the help of people who not only might but rig things to get business before the court.
That presentation of Supreme Court corruption, with more than a mere implication that "justice" Alito is acting in concert with them, was a real eye opener but I think this part of it wasn't explored and it should be for its relation to the dance of "no comment" that Amy Coney Barrett played as exposed so well by Diane Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris among others.
Since a sitting judge on the 7th Circuit could claim she didn't know I suppose a mere mortal such as myself can be pardoned for not knowing that in their devotion to justice and the rule of law, so they say, the "justices" of the Supreme Court have made themselves the beneficiaries of the lowest requirements of ethics of any part of the federal government. Though Barr and Republicans have put Trump in their class of those few, those very few who are exempt from such good-government measures, no doubt the present Republican-fascist Supreme Court helping them to do that as far as they dared.
When Senator Whitehouse was giving us his quick course in the Supreme Court and the dark money that the Supreme Court has given free reign in our politics and, now we found out the judicial, allegedly non-political branch has self-permitted itself such un-illegalized graft, my mind went back to the memory of reading of "justice" Antonin Scalia accepting a hunting trip, I believed it was, from a party who either had recently or would probably have business before the court. And, from remembering that in a period of sleeplessness worrying about the future of the United States, I find this morning that I remembered right.
Justice Antonin Scalia was taking a free vacation at the exclusive Cibolo Creek Ranch in West Texas when he was found dead inside a guest room Saturday. The trip, the Washington Post reports, was a gift from the ranch’s owner, who just last year obtained a favorable result from the Supreme Court.
The 30,000-acre hunting ranch, located around 30 miles from the Mexican border in the West Texas town of Shafter, is also the home of owner John B. Poindexter, who owns the Houston-based manufacturing firm J.B. Poindexter & Co.
The two men already had a tenuous connection outside of the ranch. Last year, an age discrimination suit filed against the Mic Group, a subsidiary of J.B. Poindexter & Co., reached the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.
In an email to the Post, Poindexter said Scalia, who was invited to the ranch as a personal guest, was not charged for his stay. A person “familiar with the ranch’s operations” tells the paper Poindexter typically hosts these free events two to three times a year.
“I did not pay for the Justice’s trip to Cibolo Creek Ranch,” Poindexter wrote in a brief email Tuesday. “He was an invited guest, along with a friend, just like 35 others.”
Poindexter added: “The Justice was treated no differently by me, as no one was charged for activities, room and board, beverages, etc. That is a 22-year policy.’’
Poindexter explicitly denied paying for Scalia’s charter flight to the ranch and declined to identify the friend who accompanied Scalia or any of the other guests on the trip.
I wonder what a full accounting of such items of value come the way of the Supreme Court justices would show. I believe Alito and Tomas have also accepted such items of value while sitting on the court and I wouldn't be surprised if others have as a regular thing. What is clear from the exposure of Scalia's corruption in this regard - he suffered little to no repercussions from it, we've got a bought Supreme Court.
It's in every way past time that that branch of the government is looked at for the rot it brings to the rest of the government, it's been pretty rotten from the time that it was packed with slave owners who regularly propped up slavery to their own benefit. The deified slave owner - not one of the "nice" ones, either - the man who invented "judicial review" all on his own without a word in the Constitution creating that Court created power, John Marshall - certainly didn't intend to let justice to slaves impinge on his personal fortune. And the corruption has gone on from there. Oh, and like the lawyer-liar he was, he found verbal fig-leaves to ensure that his scrupulous qualms never got in the way of the institution he so well benefited from. In the way that history is sometimes mal-practiced (and biography generally is) there are those who take a more permissive view of such evil but some take a more exigent view of the matter.
The greatest flaw in the government that Marshall influenced to such a high degree was its failure to effectively deal with the question of slavery, and this flaw would lead to confrontation and Civil War. The Chief Justice, a Virginian slaveholder, was well situated to impact law on this issue. One biographer, Albert Beverage, states that Marshall regretted the existence of slavery but saw no way of getting rid of it. Another, Charles Hobson, opined that he had a personal distaste for slavery but was reluctant to second-guess legislative determinations that slavery was lawful. Moderation on the slavery question was a key component of Marshall’s judicial philosophy. Not everyone holds such a positive opinion of his conduct. Historian R. Kent Newmyer believes that Marshall found no moral fault with slavery, and that he "showed little interest in the subject." This disinterest had consequences, as Marshall’s Court manifested no appreciation for the constitutional nature of slavery. When Mima Queen v. Hepburn, 11 U.S. [7 Cranch] 290 (1813) gave the Court a chance to place human rights before property rights, Marshall decided for property rights.
When it comes to slave owning, slavery enabling "justices" count me on the side of those who aren't willing to overlook them violently holding people in bondage. For slavery is inescapably an act of violence because no one would be a slave without the threat of violence and death being constantly held over them. Such is the morality of the "founders" and the legal profession that was such a big part in permitting slavery, habits the profession has not shed with the Emancipation Proclamation.
To read more about how Marshall's influence influenced a gullible fellow "justice" who started out as an abolitionist, the fine historian Paul Finkleman's book on the topic Supreme Injustice: Slavery In The Nation's Highest Court is a real eye opener. As the never voter or legislature ratified word of these slave owners on the Court still govern us through the Court and its traditions, I think nothing could be more relevant. Neither are the items such as the Electoral College and the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate which were placed there to protect the slave owners, whose ideological and in some cases actual descendants use them to rig elections with the help of the Court. I fully expect we may see the Roberts Court do what he, Kavanaugh and Barrett did in the disgusting 2000 Supreme Court putsch that put the loser of the election in the presidency.
You can read part 1 of Paul Finkleman's paper on the topic and part 2. I may be alone in it but reading about this it is far less surprising to me what evil has been done with his extra-Constitutional power grab for the court, judicial review, the famous claim backing up Marbury v Madison lived on to do even more evil such as it will soon with Obamacare. It is no surprise to me that the formerly rarely used self-granted power of the court was used for its second time five decades later to issue the infamous Dred Scott decision that declared Black People didn't have the status of human beings under the Constitution and that the intellectual descendants of the slave-power, the Republican-fascists find it so useful. For those in New England who love to imagine that John Adams, about the only "founder" who never owned a slave, was some paragon of virtue, he was the one who appointed Marshall to be Chief "Justice".
Note: This again was posted in draft form instead of final form, I'm having eye trouble exacerbated by allergies. Though I've been editing on the fly, I hope when my vision clears up I don't find too much to be embarrassed over - no, that's a lie, I'm shameless. I never feel embarrassed over it.
I had to turn off the Senate Judiciary hearings because I can't ever get to the Bar Association part of the exercises without feeling like punching some well-maintained teeth down some eloquent lying throats.
My hope lies in the time when Sheldon Whitehouse gets to make good on the threat he made this morning, that the Republicans shouldn't figure that their rules lapse as soon as Democrats get an effective majority in the Senate. I hope he gets to make good on that in a few months as he gets the record Grassley and Trump hid during the Kavanaugh process and the ones that will be successfully buried by the schedule Graham and McConnell and, really, every single Republican-fascist has made this time. I hope he goes after them and that he at the very least forces the rapist Kavanaugh off of the court. In my deepest hopes I hope he exposes the almost obvious corruption of Alito and others on the court and the dark money that are the puppet theater of this court and these confirmation processes.
I'm hoping the voters give us that Democratic majority but I'm not going to hold my breath. I think if the Republicans maintain control of the Senate, especially if Trump is put in through the combination of voter suppression and dark money that the Supreme Court permitted to twist our elections that the days of the United States are numbered. I cannot think that New England, New York, other Middle-Atlantic states, the three contiguous Pacific states will tolerate Republican-fascist rule in perpetuity, I can't imagine that by the end of the year the Supreme Court won't be the most hated institution in the country, Amy Coney Barrett the most hated woman in the country, a status she will have richly deserved by that time. I hope the Democrats win and they radically reform this corrupt court and the corruption that has been allowed to swamp democracy through its rulings. In my deepest of wishes, I wish that after two and maybe more elections rigged by the Electoral College and Republican-fascist manipulation in our lifetimes, with the help of three sitting "justices" on that court, we will be finally able to get rid of it for popular election by the winner of the popular vote.
I will add that I hope that vote-by-mail and ranked-choice voting will become universal in the United States. I did not do a ranked choice vote this time because there are phony third party candidates trying to throw the election to the Republican-fascists on the ballot and I will do nothing that will add to their credibility. No one who does not want to cast a vote for a second or third choice needs to. I have not this time though I think it is one of the best things we have done in Maine for a long, long time.
"Men like to substitute words for reality and then argue about the words,"
Edwin Armstrong, inventor of regenerative circuitry, superheterodyne circuitry and FM transmission*
In Amy Coney Barrett's near total non-responsiveness to Democrats, even to the extent that "textalist" fraud would not even note that the clear text of the Constitution does not give a Trump the power to delay the date of an election and that it specifies, exactly the minute that a Trump's term of office ends and if he refuses to go he is a criminal, she showed that she might be less full of macho bluster than her colleague Brett Kavanaugh but she's every bit as dangerous and dishonest as he is.
I have listened to a number of the exchanges with some of the Democratic Senators that show her cold-blooded method of looking for ways to do terrible things, something that her fellow Republican-fascist judges and "justices" do all the time, something that is all too common in the legal profession which has done so much to earn the disdain that so many of us feel for it. I get the feeling that a lot of those lawyers on the Democratic side of the Judiciary Committee must feel finally freed to blow the whistle on how truly evil so many members of their profession are, from sleazebag lawyers in service to oligarchy to the judges they argue in front of to the Supreme Court.
I think Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's dissertation on the flood of dark money that the "free speech" rulings by the court have released into the American political system will be a classic in exposure of corruption, corruption which the Supreme Court released even as it was told that this would be the effect of those floodgates being opened so there is no possible claim that Roberts et al didn't know exactly what they were doing. I will point out that for a good part of that the phony-liberal icon, the ACLU was thick as thieves with the dark money interests. I have not looked closely to see if anywhere there is a full study of the funding and associations of the ACLU to see if it has a significant relationship with the dark money machine but if they aren't getting paid to do what they have been able to see will result in this corruption - and they've been doing it for pretty much the entire existence of the ACLU - if they're not doing it for money they're a good example of the total cluelessness of the secular modernist "enlightenment" mindset. But, then, they're the ones who figure the Nazis and KKK should be free to get another bite at the apple despite who gets killed by them. I cannot hide my disdain for the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry that has given these fascist "justices" the language and the cultural idiocy that has been the tool of such corruption in the United States. I'm sure to have more to say about that as they've got so many real liberals and "leftists" gulled so completely.
I have to say that even those Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who regularly drive me nuts like Chris Coons and Diane Feinstein did a great job this time, though they certainly know that nothing they revealed or said or forced Amy Coney Barrett to reveal by her refusal to answer even the most obvious questions will make the slightest difference to her being put on that putrid court and doing untold damage to untold numbers of people from it. Some of their clear strategy of laying a record wasn't immediately apparent until I listened a second time.
One of those who I think is not often enough noted as a skilled questioner and deep thinker is Senator Mazie Hirono. Her exchage of yesterday exposed the cold-blooded, indifference that Barrett clearly practices that can be shielded by judge talk and lawyer talk and leaglistic babble, the kind of thing that can make the most seemingly respectable, even lovely people self-righteously do terrible things mostly to those too powerless and poor to strike back.
In her exchange with Barrett, Senator Hirono cut through it by noting the discrepancies between Barrett's babble and what she had written in her appalling dissent supporting one of Trumps anti-POOR immigrant policies that even she noted the devastating and dangerous effects it would have, which Senator Hirono supplemented with actual, real life examples of the effects that Barrett wasn't bothered by using legal babble as to why she didn't figure it was any concern of hers. I think one of the reasons that the Federalist Fascist judge choosing mechanism for the Republican-fascist party chose Barrett is that they figure hiding evil behind the facade of a white-woman with seven children would make it an easier sell than another preppy rapist. But no one should fall for the packaging, Amy Coney Barrett is as evil and cold-blooded as Alito or Gorsuch or Kavanaugh, she might even be as pathologically cruel as her hero Scalia or his sidekick Thomas. But I think their timing will make her the masthead figure on the decision that takes away healthcare from tens of millions and probably many more, maybe even on another Supreme Court coup putting Trump back in the presidency. It might seem unfair to put all the blame on her but that's a matter of Republican-fascist choice and the choice of Barrett herself.
I think the last hope of the United States staying together is if there is a big enough turn out throwing out enough Republicans in the Senate that the Democrats will have the guts to expand the courts and force reforms such as those Sheldon Whitehouse exposed that that the corrupt Supreme Court has needed from the start. Clearly they can't be counted on to police themselves, they've been getting away with murder since the start. I was interested to note that one of the cases that Coney Barrett put beyond anyone's questioning was Marbury v Madison, the one in which the Supreme Court gave themselves a power that appears nowhere in the Constitution that Barrett is all "textualist" over. Well, that power is nowhere in the text, it was not put there by amendment, if privacy rights can go, if other rights can go on the basis of it not appearing in the text, why should that corruption ridden court be able to make an exception for that self-granted power which no legislature, federal or state has passed into the text of the Constitution?
* Edwin Armstrong is a person who got robbed by the court system on behalf of rich men, some of who claimed his inventions as their property when they couldn't even understand a technical description of what he'd created. I doubt the judges who helped rob him had any understanding of the physics and math behind them and didn't care, figuring in their lawyerly liarly way that "the law" was sufficent to make their judgements real. Only it was the clumsy fiction of the law that gave them that power. One of the things I've read about him noted that he was deeply skeptical about theoretical procedures and thought experimentation and reasoning were more likely to get you somewhere. I think he knowingly made that statement based in his experience with crooked courts and judges who were the servants of the rich and so powerful.
Clearly the legalistic practice of an Amy Coney Barrett who can look at the terrible things her rulings create will find legalese to ease any vestiges of conscience she might experience, though I'm not terribly impressed with such problems from her cultic "handmaiden" catholicism. I'll bet she hates Pope Francis.
"Herd immunity" is a Darwinian superstition based on the theory of natural selection, it is always going to be a superstition that is resorted to by phony amateur biologists like the ones the Trump regime and the allegedly more enlightened Swedish regime will go to for a quick and easy strategy for dealing with public health for as long as that theory it is based in is not admitted to be wrong.
And that theory, probably the theory of science which is, in fact, responsible for more deaths, active murders as well as murders through passive means (not to mention the cutting off of peoples through forced sterilization) is the required belief of biological science, other sciences, the pseudo-social-sciences, the general college credentialed population. Even questioning its reality will get you ousted from polite society - I'm not interested in being a member of polite society - so many are too cowardly to even think about it very hard.
So, buckle your seat-belts, "herd mentality" that popular superstition of the voluntarily mentally disabled and mid-brow college-credentialed is going to be getting people killed, perhaps until natural selection finally succeeds in wiping us all out. The tragedy of that will be that there will be no one around to appreciate the irony of it.
I have to wonder if someone taking the citizenship examination had to answer the question Cory Booker asked Amy Coney Barrett, if there was an obligation of an office holder to peacefully transfer power to someone who beat him in an election answered the way she did, that she'd have to think about it in a trial, if any examiner wouldn't conclude that that candidate didn't really get it and wasn't ready for citizenship in the United States.
NO ONE WHO CANNOT GIVE THE CLEAR ANSWER BASED IN THE EXACT TEXT IN THE CONSTITUTION ON WHO GETS TO BE PRESIDENT AND WHEN THEIR TERM ENDS BASED ON THEM WINNING AN ELECTION SHOULD EVER HOLD ANY OFFICE IN THE FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, MUNICIPAL OR SMALLER CIVIC ENTITY NEVER MIND GET TO SIT ON THE SUPREME COURT.
ANY SITTING JUDGE WHO GAVE THAT ANSWER SHOULD BE IMPEACHED AND REMOVED FROM THE BENCH.
NO SENATOR WHO VOTES FOR A CANDIDATE FOR ANY JUDGESHIP OR ANY OTHER OFFICE REQUIRING SENATORIAL CONFIRMATION WHO GAVE THE ANSWER AMY CONEY BARRETT GAVE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO STAY IN THE SENATE, THEY SHOULD BE EXPELLED FOR VIOLATING THAT OATH THE REPUBLICANS LIE EVERY TIME THEY GET SWORN IN, AND THAT GOES FOR ANY DEMOCRAT OR INDEPENDENT WHO WOULD VOTE FOR SOMEONE WHO GAVE THE ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION THAT AMY CONEY BARRET GAVE.
No one who gave the answer to that and a number of the other questions she was asked should ever be licensed as a lawyer, never mind work as a Constitutional scholar at a ritzy law school. That she ever worked at Notre Dame Law School is a scandal it should not live down
What the hell is going on when someone can do what she did and the entire goddamned "free press" from highest and most overrated to lowest and probably deserving an even lower rating doesn't hollar in one voice that this woman disqualified herself from being a member of the court on that response alone. And there were many others that should be equally disqualifying.
I've long noted what a hypocritical sham Senate Judiciary Confirmation hearings had become but this proves that the Senate has discredited itself and the system of advice and consent certainly doesn't work when Republicans are in control and if they don't demand of candidates for the offices they confirm that they answer even such a simple question of basic civics, NOT EVEN A QUESTION OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY BUT OF A REPUBLIC AND NOT A DICTATORSHIP RUN BY GANGSTERS, those provisions of the Constitution giving them that power should be altered.
The Republicans are putting a woman on the Supreme Court who would not commit to the most basic definition of good government that the loser of an election does not leave an office they were voted out of peacefully or they are breaking the law and must be removed by force. She is unfit for citizenship in a republic, she has no business on its so-called highest court.
IT'S pretty clear that the Republican-fascists on the Senate Judiciary Committee prepared for a hearing that the Democrats weren't stupid enough to give them, making Coney Barrett's putative religion the center of the debate, it's clear that's what they wanted to happen but the Democrats have, so far, been smarter than that. But that's not to say her religion should be entirely off-hands. In the National Catholic Reporter one of the best journalists today, Michael Sean Winters points this out.
Let's look at religion. Writing in his archdiocesan paper, Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki complained that Barrett was subjected to a litmus test because of her faith:
"Since Judge Barrett is a practicing Catholic, her litmus test as a Supreme Court nominee will be how well she has followed the Church's teachings. Was there a litmus test for those who claim to be practicing Catholics and either occupy or wish to occupy public governing offices before this? (I'm thinking of Joseph Biden, Nancy Pelosi or Andrew Cuomo.) Of course, any religious litmus test is against the Constitution of the United States. There may be other issues, but I believe that the pro-life issue is hidden in the subtle questions that will be asked to Judge Barrett. The religious litmus test, which is now required of other political candidates, is secularism."
If there is a litmus test for Catholics to join the court, someone must have given away the answers. If confirmed, Barrett will become the sixth Catholic on the court, and a seventh was raised Catholic. Out of nine. I guess we really should be terrified about the future of our religious liberty when we only have two-thirds of the highest court in the land.
Besides, it is Barrett's supporters who bring up her religion, and her big family, as often as do her critics. If it matters to conservatives, why is it not permitted to matter to liberals?
At the annual Red Mass at St. Matthew's Cathedral in our nation's capital, Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, preached the homily. He encouraged the assembled members of the court and other jurists and lawyers to "strive daily to bring Christ into the public arena. Be authentic witnesses of his saving work." If a Catholic is supposed to bring her faith into the public arena, surely non-Catholics are entitled to ask questions about it, as I pointed out when Barrett was first nominated.
That said, given the ridiculousness of the conversation so far, Democrats are ill-advised to focus on Barrett's religion. If last week's vice presidential debate is any indication, the Democrats understand that questioning Barrett about her faith is likely to backfire. Some questions in that regard are undoubtedly bigoted and others may be legitimate, but politically, it doesn't matter: Questioning another person's faith is bad politics. As Melinda Henneberger helpfully pointed out, "All faiths are at least a little bit weird to those outside of them."
Then Michael Sean Winters blows a hole through the ideological smokescreen that Barrett as as other servants of oligarchy hide their ideological preferences behind, even as everyone in the friggin' room knows what they're doing, making some points I hadn't seen made before.
My objection to confirming Barrett remains her judicial philosophy, specifically her commitment to textualism, a kissin' cousin of the originalism espoused by her hero Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked. She defined textualism in a 2010 Boston University Law Review article:
The defining tenet of textualism is the belief that it is impossible to know whether Congress would have drafted the statute differently if it had anticipated the situation before the court. The legislative process is path-dependent and riddled with compromise. A statute's language may be at odds with its broad purpose because proponents accept less than they want in order to secure the bill's passage. The language may appear awkward because competing factions agree "to split the difference between competing principles." To respect the deals that are inevitably struck along the way, the outcome of this complex process — the statutory text — must control. A judge who reshapes statutory language to alleviate its awkwardness risks undoing the very bargains that made the statute's passage possible.
Law review articles are not easy reading, although this one was more interesting than most. I saw no flashes of that "brilliance" with which she is so often credited. (Nor have I discerned it in anything else I have read of hers.) But, reading the article, what you realize is that originalists and textualists also have to decide which interpretive canons to apply, and why, and with what limits.
The problem with textualism, then, is not that it holds that the text is essentially self-interpreting, that the meaning of the words is fixed, even though the meanings of words are never fixed. The deeper problem is that textualists present their theory in such simplistic ways for popular consumption — who wants a judge who undermines the text of the Constitution? — but in fact the reasonings they apply are just as complicated and open to personal adjustment as those deployed by the court's liberals.
Put differently, do you think a conservative scholar like Scalia or Barrett would continue to adhere to textualism or originalism if it repeatedly yielded results they did not like? They can all point to the case or two that prove the rule, for example, Scalia's vote to defend flag burning in the 1989 Texas v. Johnson case. But that was a one-off. If it had become habitual, don't you think Scalia would have gone looking for a new judicial theory?
Like originalism, textualism permits judges to state, as Barrett did in her 2017 confirmation hearings, that personal beliefs matter not a whit to the interpretation of the law. When asked by Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana about her reaction to the court's 1965 Griswold decision that married couples had a constitutional right to procure and use contraception, Barrett first noted that she had not been born when Griswold was decided.
She then added, "Well, gosh, Senator, I think, again, whatever I might have thought about it — I first read it when I was a law student. But whatever I would have thought about it then or whatever I would think about it today wouldn't matter." She is simply going to rule according to what the law says.
I've been listening to this kind of bullshit before and from the Senate Judiciary Commitee going back decades, I've written about it almost from the start of my public writing when it was about Roberts and Alito lying as everyone knew they were lying and getting away with it, it being the friggin' law and lawyers who were doing, facilitating and daintily trying to respond to the lies. Sheldon Whitehouse was about the first one I saw who effectively cut through that sham, more of his Democratic colleagues have this time, Kloubuchar, Blumenthal, Booker were good yesterday. But that's too little and too late.
PS, Since drafting this I listened to Senator Whitehouse's masterful dissertation on the dark money that the Supreme Court first released into our politics and now Republican appointees benefit from. The Supreme Court is now the epicenter of corruption in our government, both in enabling corruption and its members being determined by that corruption. It must be reigned in and cleaned up and the only real way to do that is by adding honest members to it and setting a fixed term for membership. Other than the unlikely ability to remove the thugs through impeachment - though in the case of Kavanaugh forcing his resignation due to his perjured testimony might be possible - it's going to rely on radical action by Democrats. I think one of the things that has to happen is that he original extra-Constitutional power the court gave itself, the ability to nullify duly enacted laws passed by Congress which become law, must be either strictly restricted to unanimous opinions or it must be gotten rid of altogether. I favor getting rid of it. It's a lot easier to change a law through the legislature than it is to get rid of Supreme Court made law.
