SUPREME COURT "justices" are required to take two oaths of office, from the Supreme Court website, those current are:
“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as _________ under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”
On the basis of that the four "justices" who refused to uphold the Supremacy Clause in the federal government over Texas on the border issue should all be impeached and kicked off of that goddammned Court but, of course, they won't be. The impeachment provisions of the Constitution are a quite stupidly and naively believed in myth, never having protected us against even the most criminal presidents in our history, three or four of whom gained and kept office in my lifetime, Nixon having been the only one who was forced out of office but by a group of Republican senators because they were afraid of the electoral blood bath for their party if he had been impeached and put on trial, after. The impeachment provision hasn't protected us from some of the most obviously criminal presidents, vice presidents and "justices" on that jumped up court.
As that example alone proves, we are and have not been a "government of laws, not of men," certainly not after 1803 when that court in Marbury vs Madison gave itself powers never in the Constitution, one of the results of that, which started to become not only significant but having the most dangerous of consequences in the first example of that court using that power to nullify duly adopted and long standing laws when the Taney Court issued the Dred Scott Decision, nullifying the abolition of slavery in every state and territory - nullifying not only the Missouri compromise of 1820, but the abolition of slavery in the "Northwest territories" from before the adoption of the Constitution. That decision was what Abraham Lincoln both ran for president, against but which he flouted repeatedly as the slave power racist Taney tried to sandbag his waging of the Civil War. It recently came to my attention that Taney, in anticipation of Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, had a decision nullifying it in the ready, which he could not give because the evil old man died and went to hell before he could do that. So one of the, even now, respected members of that goddamned Court would have nullified one of the greatest and best things that any elected official of the United States did to protect, along with one of the two or three most evil things about the United States, slavery, but which also protected his own personal wealth as a slave holder from a slave holding family. In that he was doing exactly what most of the members of that Court, including the most lauded member in its history, the slave-holder, ever slavery-supporting John Marshall, who repeatedly sided with slave holders against even Black People who could provide evidence that the had never been a slave.
The claims of our pious grade-school civics and history mis-educations along with the NPR, Nina Totenberg hallowing of that goddamned Court and the cinematic bullshit that comprises our collective fantasies about our country are almost entirely lies. It is those lies and even bigger ones that fuel our native form of fascism, white-supremacist Republican-fascism. So, no, I don't regret anything I've said about that or the Constitution which they twist and turn and selectively read and deceptively "interpret." That the Constitution was inspecific enough for the Supreme Court to steal that power from themselves and which was stupid enough to rely on the "honor" of such men as the "founding fathers" were and knew each other to be - they were slave holders and crooked financiers, not saints and scholars - to allow this can't be rationally or morally held to have been what we are required to pretend it is.
In a pamphlet from Wendell Phillips, he pointed out that taking such oaths to the Constitution which was (and remains) riddled with pro-slavery provisions was impossible for an honest abolitionist as long as slavery was the law of the land. I couldn't honestly take an oath to it knowing not only what it actually says BUT WHAT IT HAS BEEN MADE TO SAY BY COURTS, ESPECIALLY THAT GODDAMNED SUPREME COURT, because of that.
There is no provision more obvious than the one which gives the federal and not state governments responsibility and what is naively called "the right" to control and enforce the borders of the country. Any federal officer, any office holder who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and who hasn't and will never be removed from office due to what four members of the Supreme Court did proves that, as Louis Boudin said, we don't have a government of laws but, exactly of men, not only the long dead ones who wrote the Constitution and its amendments but, in the final assessment, of nine or any number down to five who impose their will on the Constitution through their decisions.
I think it is necessary for the continuation of the United States as a republic instead of some form of self-crowned monarchy or assembly of the same for an honest President and an honest Congress to overturn that two hundred-twenty year usurpation of power by the Court and to once and for all turn it into what it was supposed to be, even if that has to be spelled out in an amended version of the Constitution AND A LONG NEEDED REVISION OF THE ORIGINAL ORGANIZING LAWS THAT FORMED THAT GODDAMNED COURT. First of all, they have to make it easier to remove the most corrupt of them, such as Thomas and Alito are known to be and others who I suspect are at least close to them in corruption. They also need to limit the term of office so that we don't suffer under the worst of them for as long as they choose to stay on into their dotage. As the tragic finale of the admirable Ruth Bader Ginsburg proves, even the best of them can't be trusted to know when it's time for them to leave. And there aren't many in that category, "best" of them.
The United States Supreme Court has to be reduced to the state of courts in other near democracies, ours having the worst and most lax and most permissive of boundaries of any of them. It is and has, since at least Marshall's chief "justice"ship of that body, been the most frequent source of significant corruption in our country. The tiny little list of times when it didn't play some kind of malignant role, the mostly symbolic Brown v. Board, the now Court nullified Roe v Wade, along with the frequently naive and, in the end, dangerous "free speech-press" rulings that produced, among other things, Trump, aren't the real and honest history of that body. Though you'll never know that from the naive and lying pop-civics lore surrounding it.
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