I SAY THAT because they are in the process of overturning the second wave of hard and long won progress towards equality by the fiat of the white supremacist 6 votes on the court. The first wave of progress was abolition, which the Taney Court tried to kill with the Dred Scott decision which claimed that Black People under the Constitution had no rights that the federal courts or the federal government was bound to uphold and protect. They declared, in effect, that the entire country was comprised of slave states, where slave holders were free to move anywhere and set up a slave household, plantation or other operation where Black People could be enslaved and even state law could not free the People held in slavery as long as they were Black. Free Black People could be kidnapped and brought into slavery as, in fact, the Supreme Court had previously allowed in cases where it was clear they were legally free in the free state or slave state they'd been abducted in. No Black Person was safe from enslavement under the Taney decision.
The Taney decision led directly to the election of Abraham Lincoln, who ran for president on his opposition to it including the usupratory overturning of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court was decisive in the treason of those who created the Confederation, their attack on the legitimate government of the United States starting the Civil War and once the Union won, legal slavery was abolished through the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and other Civil War Amendments which settled the citizenship status of Black Americans, at least in so far as the Constitution was supposed to be concerned. It took a terrible civil war to overturn the work of Taney and his fellow Dred Scott majority. That blood and carnage added to that shed in the struggle for abolition, many abolitionists, Black but some White Peoples' blood, added to that lost in that war and its aftermath. One of the Civil War Amendments, the 14th, has been lied by the Court into meaning the opposite of what it means, they prove by that that, for purposes of the law, the Constitution is far less than what the words on paper and even the legislative record of its adoption means, it means whatever a majority of dishonest "justices" says it means and the real history of that court proves that even some of the most illustrious names on the court were thoroughly dishonest in their decisions.
For a too brief period under Reconstruction there was considerable progress in enforcing equality in the former Confederate states but that was overturned with the corrupt Electoral College bargain that Rutherford Hayes made with the slave power, which were never really defeated since their powers in the Federal Government under the slave-holder parts of the Constitution were actually enhanced because the former slaves formerly counted as 3/5ths human beings, in a provision that allowed slave holders to exercise power by counting those they held in slavery for purposes of congressional representation, stealing their political rights for themselves while stealing their lives and labor, was extended to 5/5ths under emancipation - once the slave power reasserted terror, oppression and in many cases de facto slavery over Black People and prevented them from voting.
The recent rulings that mostly aided the drawing of dishonest gerrymandered maps and allowing the suppression of the votes in Republican-fascist controlled states is a repeat of that theft of not only the political power that rightly belongs to those whose votes are suppressed, but, in fact, all voters everywhere whose government is stolen by the same powers that have blighted the United States for our entire history, starting with the rigged adoption of the Constitution. It is estimated that, largely by design, a mere 6% of even eligible white, male, property holding voters had a hand in the ratification of the Constitution, with its many provisions enhancing slave power and protecting that evil while also giving powers to the Northern financiers who largely made up the remnant of the Constitutional Convention who drafted the Constitution. The Supreme Court has been the foremost force in thwarting the efforts to reform and clean up our corrupt system, efforts by Voters and the political branches, the two which have some claim to legitimacy since they are the product of a vote. Not least of all by the absurd interpretations of the First Amendments that created a right to lie in the mass media, only one of the many evil purposes to which that most absurdly idolized passage in the Constitution have been put to by the Court.
The subsequent Supreme Courts eventually got around to establishing America's apartheid system of de facto slavery in place of legal slavery in other infamous rulings, the Plessey v Ferguson (I hear Clarence cites that atrocity as precedent for some of his claims in his recent concurrence with his fellow injustices) one that made a pretense of "separate but equal" which even the most addled of those "justices" knew was nothing like equal anymore than the Roberts Court majority really believes that the United States is not rigged for white privilege, they should know, all of them having been beneficiaries of that privilege except the one who was a major beneficiary of the affirmative action he voted with his fellow white supremacists to kill.
The many decades of struggle for abolition which was older than the Constitution, the post Civil War struggle against American Apartheid, culminated in the adoption of Civil Rights laws in the 1960s, the most important of which were the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and relatively few Supreme Court decisions, few considering the number of those which upheld and extended slave power and then its changed for into white supremacy power. The Roberts Court and the Rehnquist Court before it has been destroying that in order to send the country back to the status of legally protected American apartheid, the six "justices" doing that work as much as they dare to, for now. And it's clear they dare to go quite far, as of now, they no doubt would like to go much farther.
That the white supremacist majority have a "justice" deputed to be Black is of little importance, other than to mark him as someone as detestable as Roger Taney, himself. That is as significant as the fact that they voted to nationalize Women's' bodies with the aide of one deputed to be a Woman. As has been pointed out by many in the past few days, Clarence was one who enjoyed considerable benefit from the Civil Rights struggle and, especially, affirmative action for himself before he decided to shaft all other Black People in the country over his own personal perceived slight BY WHITE PEOPLE after the head of one of the most corrupt political families in American history working on consent with such Republicans as John Danforth who hired him on the basis of his race, put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court because he was Black. His record of service to the wealthy and racist put him where his pathology and corruption has flourished and been protected by Republicans who will never vote to impeach him no matter how corrupt he is and the damned Constitution that makes impeachment of even the most corrupt Supreme Court member as impossible as the most dangerously corrupt president in our history, Trump, who, working with the Republican Senate and the billionaire serving criminal lawyer network of which Leonard Leo is a member protect not only him but some of the other corrupt members of that damnable Court. That Clarence's wife was thick as thieves with the January 6th insurrection, something he certainly knew as he ruled on cases relevant to that massive crime, only proves how dangerous a criminally vile "justice" he is.
The original evil of the Dred Scott decision included the second time that the Court dared to use a completely Supreme Court created power to issue the Dred Scott decision which, among its worst features, overturned a decades old law that allowed Missouri to become a state, the slave power having blocked the admission of Maine to become a state on its own, independent of Massachusetts of which it was a part until 1820. The reason for that was, of course, it would have added two free-state Senators while Free State members of Congress would have resisted allowing even more of an imbalance of slave power from the admission of Missouri without Maine.
That was the second time in its history that the Court used the power John Marshall gave him and the Supreme Court, without any ratification process, to nullify duly adopted laws passed by the Congress and signed by the President. It is a power that has steadily increased in use since then, it is, in fact, how the Roberts Court has overturned the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act.
The romantic fiction that had grown up about the Supreme Court, especially during the Warren Court years, that held it was the part of government that was most protective of the rights and even freedoms of us, that, in the lying phrase over the gaudy entrance of that hideous building the Court built for itself, Equal Justice Under Law, is a disgraceful lie, in the Roberts years, one of the most shameful hypocrisies as it would have been had anyone claimed that of the Court for most of its history.
The keys to doing something about this corrupt court have to include definitively removing that power that John Marshall, one of the most consistent slave-power enhancing figures of American history, created for the court. It was a power which Abraham Lincoln opposed and, in fact, ignored when Taney and his colleagues tried to meddle in his efforts to preserve the United States against the slave power they favored. In the many posts I did on "Government By Judiciary" and associated texts that prove both the illegitimacy of that power and its danger, I asserted that the Court will never agree to give it up, it will have to be taken from it by the other two branches of the federal government.
The theory of extending the bench of the court, while good in the short term, will not really protect us from the Court which is unelected and which can't be changed by involuntarily removing corrupt members from it. The only way to protect equality and democracy from them is to remove that power from them and give them a status which practically every Western democracy gives its supreme courts which don't have that power to overturn legislation by mere fiat. Whatever dangers there might be in that, which could be said to enhance the powers of the legislature and executive, are more than matched by the danger of a court that can nationalize Women's reproductive systems and send us back into the worst era of white supremacist supremacy and never have to face removal by the Voters. How much worse can it be that the Court using that power threw us into the Civil War? Do we need to rerun that, this time with the automatic weapons in the hands of the white supremacists by Supreme Court ruling and Republican-fascism during the Bush II regime?
I think those are going to be the stakes in this struggle, which has become increasingly bad during my lifetime. I've watched it develop since 1969 as Nixon took office and started the process of changing the Court to a Republican partisan, and so billionaire bought one which would overturn any progress which had been made or would be made, still, for a little while. And the Supreme Court has been becoming increasingly bad in that period. We have to do something serious about it as soon as possible and it will have to be bold and decisive.
In the largely suppressed knowledge of how the Constitution was written and adopted, one of the more interesting objections to it was the theory of three branches holding a balance of power, if I had the time I would look up the critique of an opponent to ratification who, rightly, pointed out it was an entirely novel theory of governance coming largely from the head of John Adams. If there is one thing that is certain of the original Constitution, as adopted in the 1780s, it was the work of some rank amateurs whose conceptions of republican governance was taken from systems which were pretty bad while they were working and which all failed. They looked with the typically romantic affluent, white, male, college-credentialed eyes on the Roman Republican system which, of course, was extremely unstable, resulting in civil wars among the gangster families that ran the Republic and which corrupted into the Roman Imperial system. I think that is what the present Republican-fascist party is doing to the United States.
The thing has failed NOW, it needs enough reform that what would come out of that would be an entirely new government with an entirely new Constitution, hopefully one that would require a legitimate and informed vote by the entire People of the country. Among its many provisions written out of the experience of OUR HISTORY, not that written by aristocratic "historians" who were almost all members of one faction of crime families or other who wrote the history the "founders" relied on in the 1700s. It should certainly make it clear that Voter suppression and prevention of voting, rigging of elections is 100% unconstitutional, that lying is not a right but telling the truth is a right, in most cases an absolute right. It should also make it clear that the powers created by John Marshall to enhance the power of the branch without the legitimacy of the popular Vote in Marbury v. Madison are abolished, once and for all. If the Voting Rights Act was in full force, if the Electoral College had been abolished, we would never have had Bush II or Trump, the Supreme Court would not have done what it did this or last term.
The presently constituted Roberts Court is arguably more evil than the Taney Court was, it has overthrown the entire struggle for equal rights fought, the blood and work and struggle, the hopes against oppression of all of the generations after the Dred Scott decision was issued. I'd include the blood shed in the Civil War in that calculation because the evil idiots who issued that most damned of decisions stupidly thought they were preventing a civil war, "restoring national harmony" in that ruling. The corrupt 6 Republican-fascists on this court have no possible excuse of that kind of innocence as to what they are doing.
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