LISTENING TO DAHLIA LITHWICK and Neal Katyal waxing romantic about Stephen Breyer during the week I'm going through Louis Boudin's far harder and cooler look at the Supreme Court is rather stomach turning. Lithwick talking with Rachel Maddow talking more in sorrow over Breyer's silly idealistic refusal to admit that the very courts he has sat on are political tools of Republican-fascism mixed with Katyal talking even less realistically about him to Lawrence O'Donnell AND HIS RIDICULOUS ADVOCACY FOR BIDEN GOING SLOW as to honor Breyer is pretty infuriating. That amber tinted, soft focus lens I talked about the other day is the one that is reached for whenever the Supreme Court is talked about when the topic isn't their many rulings against the common good and for the oligarchs and even some time when it is.
The media habits in regard to its presentation of the Supreme Court are what make the public accept the outrage of that court as the ultimate road-block to equality, to economic justice, to fairness, to environmental protection. Stephen Breyer's ridiculous assertions over the past year about the character of the Court was made with the same ridiculous romantic assertions about it made in terms of its allegedly idealistic performance and motives. I would say they are anachronistic due to the fact that that court doesn't exist anymore but that would be the wrong word BECAUSE THAT COURT NEVER HAS EXISTED.
I think people don't realize that because the law is opaque and often not easily understood by lay people due to both its complexity AND THE FACT THAT LAWYERS AND JUDGES PUT A LINGUISTIC VEIL OVER WHAT THEY DO with their lawyerly often liarly language. Because of that, like much of science reporting, the public presentation in both reporting BUT EVEN MORE SO IN ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA is often wrong and frequently contrafactual. The absurdity of so much of what is held about the Court is made obvious by even a moderately deep look at the "justices" and considering their prejudices, their biases, their self-interest and that of their professional and personal friends, allies, patrons and family members. I would bet the occasions in which the privileges of any of them are put at serious risk by the rulings of that court are few to none.
I will proudly take my place among those who are extremely critical of Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the friggin' framers but when he was right he was right. As in that letter quoted the other day it is clear that after seeing the government he helped form in action for almost three decades, he saw that the Supreme Court as it was constituted was the most dangerous of the branches of the government. As Louis Boudin noted, it became steadily more dangerous in the years after that. Today we are about to see six Republican-fascists rigged onto the court by the Republican-fascists and such oligarch financed operations as the Federalist Society destroy the hard work of the Civil Rights movement, the Environmental movement, the Labor movement, Womens' Rights movement, etc. by fiat of five or six of them. And the way that the founders founded things, they have that power by their own say-so, not on anything written in the Constitution that, as seen in the posts yesterday, they regularly override with no stopping them.
Stephen Breyer is a romantic, not a realist. His brilliance is in mastering a set of given facts and fantasies, such as serve a life in the law. Perhaps the fact that the civil law is an entirely artificial, man-made structure with man given power makes it more prone to become corrupt due to those fantasies being replaced for facts and the fantasies being what is taken as the proper and serious thing, not the effect that those fantasies made law by Supreme Court fiat override things like Congressional fact finding. He may not have the character flaws that constitute the predisposition of the majority of his colleagues to do evil but his willful ignorance of what they're up to is his character flaw, one encouraged by the mythology and fantasy encouraged about the Supreme Court and "the law".
No comments:
Post a Comment