the danger has already reached a level high enough that something has to be done, now

THE SUPREME COURT'S use of the "speech" clause of the First Amendment to relegalize denial of public accommodations to a covered group in civil rights law, LGBTQ+ people, in a bogus case phonied up by billionaire funded court-packing organizations troubled me a lot over the weekend.  That troubled me more than the reported speculative nature of the case or the erroneous report about a straight man who was alleged to want a site for his same-sex wedding figuring in the court filing.   Though, neither am I much troubled if that misconception enters into the folklore about this case and the Court that issued the ruling.  They're the ones who made lying a "right", afterall.

Unlike its use of "religion" in that same style of Republican-fascist maneuver,  "freedom of speech" especially as the extra-Constitutional expansion of that to mean "freedom of expression" has no possible limit to what this or another white supremacist or Republican-fascist court could do with it to do whatever they or their patrons want.  Their billionaire and millionaire patrons include some pretty serious bigots who will supply the motive to the "justices" for doing that, though through their own bigotries and political maneuvers and personal grudges seem to provide an explanation for what they're doing even without it. The Republican Party has been trying to harness racism and other bigotries as a political tool for longer than most of those presently on the Court have been alive.  That the filthy rich who originally tried to harness white supremacy don't seem to be keeping it in harness very well doesn't seem to bother those theorized to not be racists themselves, anymore.  Not that anyone making that kind of corrupt bargain should be suspected of being a big fat supporter of any kind of equality.  The "good" Republicans who used to be depended on were never really dependable, especially after Goldwater and Nixon.

I have no doubt that this white supremacist majority will, now or when they have paved the way with immediate "precedent," see it as a terrible denial of the "free expression" of a reincarnated Lester Maddox to legally force them to serve Black People or an insurance company to insure unmarried Women on an equal basis with men.  This is just the start of it, do you really want to bet me it isn't as the current six Republican-fascists overturned many more "justices" opinions, some of those previous rulings overturned by them declared as "settled" in their confirmation lying, along with duly adopted laws and regulations to destroy affirmative action and overturn Roe v Wade?

I didn't think my nightmare of the consequences of that use of "speech" would be so obvious so fast as it is in the absurdly expansive lower court ruling that tells the Executive branch that they can't talk to social media companies or even academics in so many areas of vital importance, dealing with a deadly pandemic which was the focus of so much life threatening misinformation, something which could have gotten millions more Americans killed or the Putin regime, very probably Chinese or Saudi interference with our electoral process.

But that has happened and God only knows how that is going to be overturned in the present Republican-fascist dominated Federal Courts and the damned Supreme Court with a Republican-fascist, billionaire bought majority on it.  The Supreme Court, many lower courts, are blatantly Republican-fascist partisan dominated, Leonard Leo-billionaire bought and ready to do whatever they can to solidify Republican-fascist power, even at the cost of millions of lives. Every ruling by this court emboldens those also put into place by the Republican-fascists and billionaires in their court packing operation.  The Supreme Court majority is bought and installed through corruption.

How that will happen to save us from them in the next election is something that has to worry anyone who still favors the right of government of, by and for The People on the basis of accurate information to inform their votes instead of lies empowered by the Supreme Court.

This is a perfect example of just how dangerous some of the rulings on the speech clause and other clauses of the First Amendment can get when the mere language of them, not their reasoning but the mere words of them can be twisted for anti-democratic purposes by corrupt judges and "justices."  As those familiar with what I post here know I often mention the Sullivan Decision as among the most dangerous of those rulings made in all innocence by the Warren Court only to see that metastasize into Buckley v. Valeo, a series of rulings overturning clean elections legislation and the Citizens United ruling that allowed Putin and others to ratfuck our elections with the collusion of the Republican-fascist party and those behind Trump.  

It should be noticed that in so many of their corrupt rulings the Republican-fascists on the court have weaponized words and slogans either provided to them or popularized through the "liberal" court during the Warren years or through the popular notions of libertarian liberty in movies, TV shows and political blather. I am certain that the learned Warren era and even other liberal justices had little appreciation for how thier attempts to expand the meanings of words to allow strip-tease artistes to work without risk of a police raid would be used to empower the enemies of equality and electoral democracy.  But, then, I doubt that the drafters of the Constitution ever imagined that the sloppily worded First Amendment would mean what Republican-fascists "justices" and judges make it mean nor that the as sloppily worded Second Amendment would be used to kill white people, it having been written to protect white slave-holders against slave insurrections.

The Court is the epicenter of the danger to America's democracy, it is the source of the dangers, from the insane invention of a "right" to lie right down to putting automatic weapons in the hands of American mass murderers.  And the foremost tool which it has used to do most of that is the idolized Bill of Rights.  The idols of secularism would seem to be a lot more dangerous than those made of  false gods.  That they could do that, especially with that Court created power to overturn duly adopted Federal legislation and to openly lie about the legislative record of other amendments to the Constitution proves that the Supreme Court, now exposed for its monumental corruption, has to be reigned in and stopped as soon as possible.  And we don't know what is possible until it is tried.

When the now Murdoch owned Völkischer Beobachter of American Mammonism, The Wall Street Journal is whining about court reform in terms of disempowering the stolen Court majority it should be taken as a certain signal that doing that is absolutely in the interest of the American People.

That the Supreme Court is the epicenter is a combination of it not being a legitimately democratic branch of government wit the possibility of removal by the voters, the folly of giving them lifetime appointments who are no more removable by impeachment than the most criminal presidents of our lifetimes have been, and the flagrant corruption that is bound to happen when any group of people with power are left to police themselves.  It was one of the telling follies of the amateurs who drafted the Constitution that they thought a group of people given the power they gave the Court such as the Supreme Court would be any less prone to corruption than a single monarch would have been. The history of the Roman Republic should have told them otherwise, the Imperial system came out of only one of those schemes of shared power.  The extra-Constitutional power to nullify legislation the court gave itself should stand as the first, worst and most successfully sold corruption in the history of our corrupt Supreme Court.  The Constitution makes the court unaccountable to anyone else, in fact. Their imaginary limit of impeachment by the Congress as laid out in the Constitution has never worked.  We should face that is a reality which makes the members of the court unanswerable to anyone, not even each other.

Its actual history, as told by the self-interst of "justices" such as John Marshall and the other slave holding "justices" those who could be counted on to rule in favor of slave-holders, oligarchs, plutocrats, aristocrats and other rich, especially white people and corporations is the real, non-amber tinted, non-Nina Totenberg narrated history of that body.  It is remarkable the extent to which the popular history of the Supreme Court has been told in its remarkable exceptions, its short epochs of justice ignoring the majority of its history.  That John Marshall is held in such regard as he is shows how successful the PR con job has been.

President Biden should study Jefferson's warnings about Court power and Lincoln's response to the meddling of the Taney Court in the conduct of the Civil War, he should look into the criticism made by law scholars of the Dred Scott decision and the others who have been critical of that power which started out modestly enough in Marbury v Madison but which led directly to the Civil War.  He should look at the criticism by Louis Boudin of the Marbury decision* which pointed out that not only did the authors and Congressional and Executive adopters of the provisions in the Court Act overturned in Marbury comprise many of those who drafted and adopted the Constitution but which included a founding father, John Marshall's immediate predecessor as Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, who, if I recall, drafted both the Court Act and had a direct hand in the drafting of the very creation of the Court in the Constitution.  Marshall declared that he, not a drafter of the Constitution, knew what it meant better than those who wrote it, voted for and adopted the Court Act, including Madison and Adams and Washington, himself.  I am pretty certain that if the Constitution had included that Court created ability for unelected "justices" to overturn duly adopted legislation and to, actually, create law from the bench, the Constitution would never have been adopted.  As Marshall, himself, wrote in his biography of Washington, the adoption of the Constitution was remarkably close, as it was.  I would bet that the founders, themselves, would have concluded it should be sent back for further work on it if it contained that Court power, so obviously dangerous is such a power.

The Court has to have that power stripped from it, it has to be restored to what a normal supreme court in a democracy is because in this Robert's Court as the Rehnquist one before it, it is again proven to be a danger to democracy.  Especially the only democracy that is legitimate, egalitarian democracy.  And, now, it is even proven to be a danger to our personal safety against automatic weapons in the hands of psycopaths and open AND CONCEALED carrying crackpots.  It is an immediate danger to the the security of the country in opening up our elections to the influence and lies peddled by fascists foreign and domestic and the proven influence of dictators such as Putin. It is a danger which is reestablishing white supremacy and male supremacy.  It is a weapon against widely discriminated against minorities and poor people. The present day Court has to know that these reforms and reigning in of their power are openly being discussed as a reaction to their florid corruption and outrageous power grabbing and their service to the corruption of modern Mammonism.  Roberts should know that if they continue to pull anything like they've been pulling that it is a danger to their position. AND THAT INCLUDES BOTH BY THEIR ACTION AND ALLOWING CORRUPT LOWER JUDGES RULINGS TO STAND THROUGH THE SHADOW DOCKET.  I would favor rewriting the rules to term out the majority of today's majority at the quickest possible date, ALONG WITH A LIFETIME BAN ON FORMER "JUSTICES" PROFITING OFF OF ANYONE WHO PROFITED FROM THEIR RULINGS MADE DURING THEIR TENURE ON THE COURT.

I think it's time for the Executive and Legislative branches to assert their legitimacy OVER the court.  They must acknowledge the normal powers of a Supreme Court in a democracy but they should absolutely reject the Court created powers which were never ratified by anything but that Court.  It's a dangerous maneuver, considering how strong white supremacist fascisim in the country, how dangerous the billionaire class is.  But the danger has already reached a level high enough that something has to be done, now.  If, by a miracle, Biden wins the election with a strong enough majority in both houses of the Congress, they should immediately adopt a new Court Act which, among other things, explicitly rejects Marbury v. Madison's nullification provisions.  They should formally overturn the Dred Scott and other decisions of that kind and they should disempower the fascists on this court by swamping them with new judgeships and justices.  They should adopt a term limit for the court which would get rid of some of the worst.  The best long-lived "justices" in all of our history have not made up for the worst long-lived "justices" in our history.  

As the tragic legacy of one of the best justices of my lifetime, Ruth Bader Ginsberg proves, it is extremely dangerous to allow them to decide when they are leaving the court, since there is no removal of them by the Voters or a term limit.  It is the tragedy of her life that she didn't have the wisdom to retire in the repeated warnings of her own mortality that she was given.  If someone of HER character and wisdom can't be counted on to know when it's time to leave, no one now or in the future should be trusted to know that.  No one, not the best of them, is worth keeping a Clarence Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Taney, etc. on the court till they decide to leave or they die.  There are so many more Scalias and Taneys in the Court's history than RBGs.  So many fewer John Paul Stevenses than Clarence Thomases and Roger Taneys.  

* Marshall accomplished his purpose by convincing the Associate Justices of the unconstitutionality of that section of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789 which expressly conferred upon the Supreme Court the power to issue writs of mandamus and prohibition, and in persuading them to allow him to announce that conclusion as the opinion of the court.  When we consider that, while all of the Justices agreed with Marshall that the provision of the Ellsworth Judiciary Law requiring them to sit as circuit justices was unconstitutional, and yet refused to act upon the belief as Marshall wanted them to act,* we can realize the measure of his triumph in inducing the same men to hold unconstitutional another provision of the same act - a provision, too, even less open to objection than the one they had sustained.

The Theory of the Chief Justice that Section 13 of the old Judiciary Law was unconstitutional was absolutely new, and it was as daring as it was novel.  It was the only original ideal that Marshall contributed to the entire controversy.  Nobody ever questioned the validity of that section of the statute which Marshall now challenged.  Ellsworth, who preceded Marshall as Chief Justice, had drawn the act when he was Senator in the First Congress;  he was one of the greatest lawyers of his time and an influential member of the Constitutional Convention.
 

One of Marshall's associates on the Supreme Bench at that very moment, William Paterson, had also been, with Ellsworth a member of the Senate Committee that reported the Judiciary act of 1789, and he, too, had been a member of the Constitutional Convention.  Senators Gouverneur Morris of New  York, William S. Johnson of Connecticut, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, William Few of Georgia, George Read and Richard Bassett of Delaware, and Caleb Strong of Massachusetts supported the Ellsworth Law when the Senate passed it;  and in the House James Madison and George Wythe of Virginia, Abraham Baldwin of Georgia, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut heartily favored and voted for the act.  Most of these men were thorough lawyers and every one of them also helped draft the National Constitution.  Here were twelve men, many of them highly learned in the law, makers of the Constitution, draftsmen or advocates and supporters of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789, not one of whom had ever dreamed that an important section of the law was unconstitutional.  

Furthermore from the organization of the Supreme Court to that moment, the bench and bar had accepted it, and the Justices of the Supreme Court, sitting with National district judges, had recognized its authority when called upon to take action in a particular controversy brought directly under it.  The Supreme Court itself had held that it had jurisdiction, under Section 13, to issue a mandamus in a proper case, and had granted a writ of prohibition by authority of the same section.  In two other cases this section had come before the Supreme Court, and no one had even intimated that it was unconstitutional. . . .