You know as we approach July that the Republican-fascists are going to make a big deal out of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It's going to make the Buycentennial during Ford's regime seem less emetic than it was and it was plenty emetic. You remember the Declaration which they and the legal system have ignored pretty much the entire history of the country, the Constitution is, in large part, a repudiation of the very foundation of that document given in the first couple of paragraphs. No wonder, under The Declaration we would have been justified in overturning the system it set up most of our existence as a country under the Constitution. Slaves certainly had that right the entire time. And such an overturning is certainly that is one of the things that the post-Civil War Congress and a majority of State Legislatures did in the Civil War Amendments which he most corrupt and oligarchic of all the branches set up in the Constitution, the Supreme Court have been annulling, amending and distorting for pretty much the entire period after that, none more corruptly or blatantly or with such obvious self-interest as the Roberts Court. The Rehnquist majority did a lot in that regard but never so much as the Roberts Court has done. The teaching of American history is dishonest, it is clear that there has been a continual struggle by Black People, other People of Color, Women, Workers members of other oppressed minorities, the poor, etc. to secure their rights as stated by the Declaration only to continuously see progress towards that, bought with decades of struggle and blood and toil and suffering, overturned by the Court reimposing the 1780s Constitutional order and, in many cases, making it far worse than the text of the document could justify.
It's kind of uncanny, as Olbermann points out how many of the things Jefferson had the wisdom to list then are our everyday reality, I will state again that the Jefferson who was there on the day he wrote that document was the absolute peak of Jefferson's moral clarity - he quickly and revoltingly devolved into a slave owning- slave raping (child raping, actually) Virginia aristocrat (the same ilk of genteel white supremacist that Roberts is) but that doesn't negate the truth or value of what he gave as the justification of People aspiring to freedom and a decent life for all in overturning ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Going back to what was there in October 2024 is not enough, it is entirely inadequate, that form of government is what got us where we are ESPECIALLY THE POWERS THAT THE ROBERTS COURT WAS ALLOWED IN HANDING OVER THE GOVERNMENT TO QUID PRO QUO CORRUPTION (WHICH IS RAMPANT AMONG THE REPUBLICANS ON THE COURT NOW) AND TURNING TRUMP INTO A DICTATORIAL MONARCH ABOVE THE LAW. As critical as I am of the U.S. Constitution, it did both with powers that it was given nowhere in the Constitution, the power to negate and nullify parts of duly adopted federal law AND THE CONSTITUTION, ITSELF.
Part of that was its refusal to enforce the disqualification of insurrectionists from holding federal office in the 14th Amendment. Despite the unanimous ruling of the Court including three Democrats who had rather dumb reasons for voting as they did, they were correct that the six Republican-fascists on the court went way beyond what was warranted by the Amendment and its legislative history in saying that the Congress (in the hands of Republican-fascists) had exclusive power to make the determination of who had disqualified themselves by committing insurrection against the Constitution and they explicitly noted that the Republicans had done so specifically on behalf of Trump.
No Democratic government, if we ever have another one, which does not make progress in reigning in this bought and paid for Court and, in fact, that institution, stripping it of the Marbury power it created for itself will have done anything like an adequate job of making the country safe. I'm afraid the lawyers in the Congress will be too cowardly or craven or merely reluctant to face that fact as, for example, Biden's Department of Justice did too little and far too late to prosecute Trump. Jefferson was a lawyer, as were most of the actual framers, but clearly they were lawyers who had more courage than of that profession today.
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