Footnote To The Post Below

IN HONOR OF IT BEING LABOR DAY WEEKEND, here is a link to a report dealing with just what I'm talking about. 

It's summary is given here. 

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 3, 2022 – Today Alliance for Justice announced the release of a new special report entitled Economic Justice, Judges, and the Law, a first-of-its-kind analysis detailing the severe under-representation of lawyers with backgrounds in labor and economic justice fields among active federal circuit court judges. The report finds that, among active circuit court judges, 68% are former corporate attorneys, and 28% are former prosecutors. The report also notes that judges with these legal backgrounds are far more likely to rule against workers and consumers than judges with other forms of legal expertise. By contrast, only 6% of active circuit court judges have experience in labor or economic justice fields including union-side labor law, employee-side wage and hour law, consumer protection, and civil legal aid. 

Update:   I just noticed that either I or auto-correct mistook the name of the Greek goddess of hunting for the snotty minor Platonist for whom the make-believe lawyer was named.   I don't know which is to blame.   If any of the three or so readers of the post at the time noticed, they were too polite to point that out to me.    Feel free to correct me,  I'd rather be embarrassed than to persist in error.  No idea how auto-correct feels about that. 

leaving the ultimate decision making in our law, in our government, the interpretation of the Constitution in the hands of those enculturated in the law and the lore, habits and dubious scruples and what is laughably called "ethics" of the legal profession is supremely dangerous

IT'S MY EXPERIENCE THAT LABOR DAY WEEKEND is second only to Thanksgiving Weekend in having things you post online not being read because who isn't doing something more important, like being with your family and friends. 

In an earlier attack I made on the Supreme Court I dealt with the excuses for the Supreme Court usurping the powers given to the Congress and president in several posts, two of which I am going to repost with some new commentary this week. 

I have been criticized for being hard on lawyers, judges and most of all "justices" in these posts but I'm not going to pretend for a second that they don't deserve it.  

The profession, itself, has one of its foundational practices in looking for opportunities for their clients and themselves to do things that are either objectionable to others or, more importantly, harm others, many of which lie in the impossibility of writing laws to cover every single nuance in which they can regulate in life.  

And that is what a law does.  The objections of conservatives, right wingers to the government "regulating" things is, itself, an objection to why governments exist and why laws have any legitimacy at all because they want to do things that hurt others.   That's the nature of conservatism as that word has developed in the modern period. 

I suspect that for most Americans, Brits, Canadians and others among the generally English speaking peoples, that last sentence will be read as me criticizing the legal racketeers for getting real criminals who seriously injure, rape, etc. others off in a dramatic fashion in a court trial.   For most of us our conception of the law and its personnel are formed by some of the worst of TV, movies, stage plays, pulp fiction and the blathering of those on TV, radio and, worse than those once were, online.   Which is entirely unrealistic.  And generally melodramatic and badly written. 

While sometimes, in the rarest of instances that kind of crusading for something called "justice" actually happens, it is not the real character of the legal profession or the results of its activities.  It's not even typical of defense lawyers who, as they proudly announce, represent the guilty as easily as they do the innocent, especially those who can pay their fees.  It is undeniable that that the business of lawyers is to twist evidence and lie and exploit prejudices* and emotions or even the uncertainty of jurors (reasonable or unreasonable, it doesn't seem to matter much which one)  to allow bad People to escape legal punishments for doing some really terrible things.   Generally that is done in line with two traits of criminals, belonging to a privileged class of People or, more destructive of justice, have great wealth.   

Lawyers are in the business of billing far, far, far, more than they are in the business of crusading for something called "justice."  

But the foremost and likely most destructive activity of lawyers and many judges and, I'd argue the majority of "justices" in the history of our Supreme Court is to allow those with wealth to do what they want to do unhampered by laws passed by legislatures and signed by presidents and governors.   I would say that the overwhelming presence of those in the legal profession in legislatures and among governors and presidents have, like those they appoint to judgeships and especially to supreme courts, is to extend the habits and practices of their profession into the actual, written laws so as to profit those who have or they hope in the future to profit from.   I say without any fear that I"m being unjust to say that service to those with the most money is probably the most certain route to a judgeship or a seat on the Supreme Court. 

There is a reason why the only U.S. Supreme Court "justice" in history has worked as a low-paid Public Defender,  the most recently confirmed of them,  is Ketanji Brown Jackson.  The number who have worked as corporate lawyers is so numerous that almost all of the other members of just the present court have been corporate lawyers.  And that really makes A COMPLETE DIFFERENCE in the "justice" that the U.S. Supreme Court issues.   

Here, from a 2014 analysis:

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court. None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.

They are the elite of the elite: Although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court, these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to decide from 2004 through 2012.

Of the 66 lawyers mentioned above, 51 worked for law firms that primarily represent business interests. This means that over time corporate America cultivates a small pool of lawyers who are better able to get cases before the Supreme Court than any other attorneys in the country. And they acknowledge that they avoid taking cases from individuals seeking to challenge their high-paying corporate clients, whose activities and concerns are generally entangled and embedded throughout society.

Individuals seeking to challenge large businesses are left to choose from a smaller pool of less experienced and less successful lawyers.

Reuters continues:

An elite firm might refuse to represent an individual suing a corporation on a labor issue, for example, because it fears that winning the case could create a precedent that might hurt top clients in other industries. Large firms do take cases pro bono on behalf of the indigent. But those appeals are generally related to criminal law or social causes such as gay marriage – topics unlikely to affect U.S. business interests.

For many top firms, the conflicts mean declining to represent environmental organizations, labor unions, employees suing employers, or consumers filing class actions.

Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the midsized firm Cohen Milstein who argued a Supreme Court case against Wal-Mart and for a class of more than 1.5 million female employees who alleged gender discrimination, said, “It’s not that there aren’t lawyers at these large firms who aren’t public-spirit minded and don’t want to do these cases. It’s that their business model won’t allow it.

. . . Michael Luttig, general counsel for aerospace giant Boeing Co., said of the new class of lawyers who are intimate with the Supreme Court, “It has become a guild, a narrow group of elite justices and elite counsel talking to each other.” The court and its elite bar have grown “detached and isolated from the real world, ultimately at the price of the healthy and proper development of the law.”

I think that all of this is one of the biggest reasons that leaving the ultimate decision making in our law, in our government, in the interpretation of the Constitution - WHICH IS FAR MORE THAN JUST A BUNCH OF LAWS - in the hands of those enculturated in the law and the lore, habits and dubious scruples and what is laughably called "ethics" of the legal profession is supremely dangerous.  Even many of the most moral of them,  and I hold they are not typical of those who are in that profession, anymore than those in any other line of work,  are blind to some of the most outrageous practices of their fellow lawyers.    You hear it all the time from the likes of those who are regularly tapped for commentary on the outrageous decisions and actions of those on the Roberts Court.   As I've pointed out a number of times here,  it was hearing one such lawyer whose career and commentary I have enormous respect for declare that there is "a right to lie" that broke my conception of that profession, one built up in the regular way,  by imbibing the tripe of Atticus Finch and Horace Rumpole and following the heroic careers of real lawyers - often on the basis of my own prejudices and what I was persuaded to believe by advocacy journalism. 

Journalists, now there's another profession just about all of this applies to.  Even many of the real ones, reporters. 

I have been thinking more and more about Thomas Jefferson's statement in his 1819 letter rejecting the Marbury power in which he said his "construction" of the Constitution gave all three branches of the government the power that the Supreme Court declared it alone had, of defining the meaning of the Constitution.  Our history would have, certainly, been far different if that had been the case.  Just for a start, the 1870 Voting Rights Act and the 1875 Civil Right Act that went far in enforcing the equality of Black People and other People of Color would have stood for the rest of our history instead of being abolished, along with the even earlier anti-lynching law by the Supreme Court in 1883.  Imagine if that had been the law of the land, including in the states of the Confederacy and all the others.   The Congress, which everyone slams all the time, came up with law after law to protect disfavored minorities, workers, etc.  State legislatures came up with such laws AS WELL AS LAWS DISCRIMINATING AGAINST BLACK PEOPLE, WORKERS, ETC.   Only it's generally been the laws that favored oppressed minorities, workers, etc.  that the lawyers on the Supreme Court have found "unconstitutional."  The Warren Court was an outlier for a reason,  and even then a lot of their landmark "civil liberties" rulings proved to be foolish, giving the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts tools and words to twist to their ends.   

I don't trust the thinking of the lawyers among their fellow lawyers, not when they can make their ideas into law.  Not as compared to those who have to persuade non-lawyers in legislatures to get bills passed or those who, usually after having served long in the Congress,  in the presidency.   I'd rather put my future in the hands of the elected Congress than in the unelected, generally corporate lawyers of the Supreme Court. 

* There is little to keep a judge's prejudices out of it and absolutely nothing to keep a Supreme Court "justices'" prejudices out of the law. 

Lying Lawyers Get People Killed In Large Numbers

BY NOW YOU KNOW that I loathe Little Bobby Kennedy,  RFK jr. along with every single other person in the Trump II regime and, really, every single person who still belongs to the Republican Party.  It's got the same moral status as the American Nazi Party, the KKK, White Citizens Councils, the John Birch Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, Hoover Institution, . . . sorry, been doing some research into the origins of the "unitary executive" form of fascism that the Court has replaced the written Constitution with,  the role of our original fascists under their various guises.  More about that in the future.  

I've suspected from the start of his latest racket, as Trump's Sec of "health and human services" was him gutting the science on things like vaccines so he and his law firm could cite the phony "science" when he goes back to being just a plain ambulance chasing anti-vaxx lawyer-liar so he can reap millions from here till his steroid use finally ends his disgusting life.   I was certain of it when he wouldn't promise that he wouldn't profit from it when Elizabeth Warren gave him the opportunity to do that during his confirmation hearings.  Like most liar-lawyers, if he's the one under oath as a witness, his facility for lying can be rather easily exposed,  though that almost never leads to a Republican being refused confirmation, as the membership of the current Court proves. 

And now he's been caught trying to cover up deaths from the measles epidemic that he and his fellow anti-vaxxers fomented with their lies and pseudo-science.  

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked his new CDC director to remove a reference to two Pennsylvania deaths from the agency’s online measles tally after he questioned whether the disease contributed to the ​fatalities, three sources familiar with the situation said.

Kennedy’s request came after CDC staffers had already accepted the state’s characterization of the deaths as linked to measles, a Pennsylvania official ‌said.

Despite that, Erica Schwartz, the recently appointed director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed with Kennedy’s directive and implemented it without objection, said the three sources familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The move followed a heated exchange on social media between Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine activist appointed by President Donald Trump, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. The two officials accused each other of politicizing the outbreak in Pennsylvania, the latest state to grapple with a ​resurgence of measles since the Trump administration took office.

Data from the CDC and from individual states shows that vaccine rates have been declining, with many medical organizations citing rising vaccine hesitancy as a major ​cause. In Pennsylvania alone, the state health department has reported 540 measles cases this year.

Georges Benjamin, chief executive of the American Public Health Association and formerly ⁠Maryland's secretary of health, said it is "unheard of" for the CDC to publicly raise doubts about the conclusions of state and local health departments, even if the agency seeks more information.

"The secretary had no business ​interfering in the normal process," Benjamin said. "He has an anti-vaccine agenda and he's using this to play out his anti-vaccine agenda.”

I hope that Democrats get the chance to go after these criminals and hold them accountable but under our corrupt Constitution and government I'm not holding my breath.    I'm not very familiar with that Erica Schwartz skank but I'll bet there's something in it for her, too.  I mean other than getting another appointment from Trump, she had one in his first regime, too. 

I wish his cousin,  Caroline would come out with more of the family knowledge of him and his dark past.   He is a seriously dangerous psychopath and entirely amoral.  

I Hope Gloria Steinem Is Happily Being Reunited With Other Heroes Like Shirley Chisholm

Their like is missed though there are others who build on what they built.    What the Supreme Court didn't knock down, that is. 

Maybe I should Make Shirley Chisholm's memoir my next book to type out and study.  My copy has teeny-tiny print so I'll have to use a magnifier to do it. 

I Am Left Thinking In The Face Of This That Those Who Support The IHRA "Definition" of Antisemitism Are Guilty Of The Same Thing That David Irving Is

 

A sense of honesty doesn't come into it for a second - Cry The Benighted Country

THIS WEEK, IN MY COUNTRY,  the Republican-fascists in Congress, in the state houses,  the Roberts Court,  most of all in the media and among the billionaires, fawning over and humoring Trump remind me of this from Petronius's infamous novel.  Only we're a lot worse,  Eumolpus knew what he was doing was a con to rope in corrupt greedy people,  Trump has sold himself as what he pretends to be, most of all to himself.   It was the corporations going along with his renaming of Lake Ontario that tipped the scale.   And it's Trump making them eat shit while he's alive AND THEM DOING IT WITHOUT SHAME, SO MUCH STRONGER IS THEIR GREED THAN EVEN A SENSE OF DIGNITY.   A sense of honesty doesn't come into it for a second.   Such is the product of the legal standing of the Courts and the real Constitution they made up that lying is as valid as the truth.   Though Madison et al got that started with their stab at neo-classical brevity.  Lawyers are generally shitty poets and worse law writers. 

That this is happening now when it never happened before to this extent, not even in Trump I is a product of Trump v. USA, brought to you by the minds trained in the Ivy League law schools and the Federalist-fascist Society. 

(“I have thought up a scheme,” replied Eumolpus, “which will embarrass our fortune-hunting friends sorely,” and as he said this, he drew his tablets from his wallet and read his last wishes aloud, as follows:) 

“All who are down for legacies under my will, my freedmen only excepted, shall come into what I bequeath them subject to this condition, that they do cut my body into pieces and devour said pieces in sight of the crowd: {nor need they be inordinately shocked} for among some peoples, the law ordaining that the dead shall be devoured by their relatives is still in force; nay, even the sick are often abused because they render their own flesh worse! 

I admonish my friends, by these presents, lest they refuse what I command, that they devour my carcass with as great relish as they damned my soul!” (Eumolpus had just started reading the first clauses when several of his most intimate friends entered the room and catching sight of the tablets in his hand in which was contained his last will and testament, besought him earnestly to permit them to hear the contents. He consented immediately and read the entire instrument from first to last. 

But when they had heard that extraordinary stipulation by which they were under the necessity of devouring his carcass, they were greatly cast down, but) his reputation for enormous wealth dulled the eyes and brains of the wretches, (and they were such cringing sycophants that they dared not complain of the outrage in his hearing. 

One there was, nevertheless, named) Gorgias, who was willing to comply, (provided he did not have too long to wait! To this, Eumolpus made answer:) “I have no fear that your stomach will turn, it will obey orders; if, for one hour of nausea you promise it a plethora of good things: just shut your eyes and pretend that it’s not human guts you’ve bolted, but ten million sesterces! 

And beside, we will find some condiment which will disguise the taste! No flesh is palatable of itself, it must be seasoned by art and reconciled to the unwilling stomach. And, if you desire to fortify the plan by precedents, the Saguntines ate human flesh when besieged by Hannibal, and they had no legacy in prospect! 

In stress of famine, the inhabitants of Petelia did the same and gained nothing from the diet except that they were not hungry! When Numantia was taken by Scipio, mothers, with the half-eaten bodies of their babes in their bosoms, were found! (Therefore, since it is only the thought of eating human flesh that makes you squeamish, you must try to overcome your aversion, with all your heart, so that you may come into the immense legacies I have put you down for!” 

So carelessly did Eumolpus reel off these extravagances that the fortune-hunters began to lose faith in the validity of his promises and subjected our words and actions to a closer scrutiny immediately; their suspicions grew with their experience and they came to the conclusion that we were out and out grafters, and thereupon those who had been put to the greatest expense for our entertainment resolved to seize us and take it out in just revenge; but Chrysis, who was privy to all their scheming, informed me of the designs which the Crotonians had hatched; and when I heard this news, I was so terrified that I fled instantly, with Giton, and left Eumolpus to his fate. 

I learned, a few days later, that the Crotonians, furious because the old fox had lived so long and so sumptuously at the public expense, had put him to death in the Massilian manner. That you may comprehend what this means, know that) whenever the Massilians were ravaged by the plague, one of the poor would offer himself to be fed for a whole year upon choice food at public charge; after which, decked out with olive branches and sacred vestments, he was led out through the entire city, loaded with imprecations so that he might take to himself the evils from which the city suffered, and then thrown headlong (from the cliff.)

Our fortune hunters are still playing stupid and nothing will get them to admit it's gone too far.  The Roberts majority as much as anyone.  So much more corrupt is the decadence of America in 2026. 

Aaron Copland - Violin Sonata - 1st movement

 

Louis Kaufman - Violin

Aaron Copland - Piano

This is the third performance of this sonata I've heard in which Copland, himself, plays the piano part.  The subtle differences in them is fascinating.  

This piece makes me mourn the country that I used to think I would one day live in. 

Update: 2nd Movement

3rd Movement 

Hate Mail - It's not so much that I "hate Israel"

as it is that I'VE HAD IT WITH ISRAEL AND ITS DOMESTIC LOBBY.   I've had it with their absurdly out sized influence on the United States, leading to us participating in Israel's apartheid and Lebensraum program of stealing land from Palestinians and its neighboring states, terrorizing and murdering huge numbers of People to do it.   

I can say I have come to hate Zionism.   Just as I hate every other kind of supremacist and chauvinistic ideology, ESPECIALLY those originating in the United States.   And the strongest influence on me in that are a number of anti-Zionist rabbis and the remnants of the Jewish Bund movement.  I don't think I'd have gotten to this point without their influence on me. 

I Want The Next Democratic President

To issue an executive order to tear down the Supreme Court building and replace it with homeless housing.   

The Court has created a monster and I hope it ends up destroying their fascist-marble palace during the lifetimes of the Roberts New Taney majority. 

Proof That John Roberts Is The New Roger Taney

I HAD INTENDED to issue an updated index of the pieces about abolishing the Marbury power grab by the Supreme Court but haven't gotten round to that yet.  I hope to later this week.    

Of all of the issues apart from doing everything possible to get Republican-fascists out of power in the Congress,  a short term but absolutely necessary goal, there is no more important long term goal than to take away the self-created power of the Supreme Court to nullify Congressionally and presidentially adopted laws WHICH HAS BEEN THE PRIMARY MEANS OF THE OPPONENTS OF EQUALITY AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE TO THWART EVERY SINGLE SUCCESSFUL STRUGGLE TO GET THE CONGRESS AND PRESIDENTS TO MAKE SUCH REAL,  EVERY DAY,  EQUALITY, AND SO DEMOCRACY, THE REAL LAW THAT GOVERNS US.  

From the overturning of the 1870 Voting Rights Act and the 1875 Civil Rights Act and all of the other post-Civil War legislation to make equality the law of the land, to the Roberts Court overturning the work of several Congresses and Presidents to make the United States a non-racist and egalitarian democracy,  the Supreme Court has been the absolute nulliyer and vetoer of the United States as what it is pretended to be,  a democracy based on the principles claimed by the Declaration of Independence and the preface to the Constitution in which the claims of what the founders and framers were offering to We The People were made.  

THE SUPREME COURT HAS REPEATEDLY, FROM THE TIME OF JOHN MARSHALL BEEN THE BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT WHICH HAS BEEN THE PROTECTOR OF PRIVILEGE, INEQUALITY, INJUSTICE AND, WITH ROBERTS AND THE FIVE FASCISTS IN HIS MAJORITY,  DELIVERED PRESIDENTIAL DESPOTISM AND ARE DOING EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO NULLIFY AN ELECTION WHICH MIGHT THROW THEIR PARTY OUT OF POWER. 

That includes what they have done  with their "Constitutional interpretation" to destroy the rights of those who work for a living, Women, etc. 

I haven't been a subscriber to The Progressive for about forty years,  I can't remember if it was something they published which I vehemently held was counterproductive or if I just got sick and tired of supporting a magazine that had the putrid and traitorous Nat Hentoff as their resident "first amendment absolutist"  purity scold.

So I missed this article published the day I began my latest series laying out why we have to go much farther than mere "court reform" which I guarantee you the Court will find a way to nullify as they have the parts of the 14th Amendment whenever it's inconvenient to their ends. 

The Long Con of John Roberts by Bill Blum

It makes the case for what I've been arguing that John Roberts is merely the latest in a string of racist, oligarchy-serving  "justices" and Chief "justices" who work in the same line as Roger Taney, Morrison Waite, Melville Fuller and the man who never met a case in which he didn't side with the slaver-power, the originator of the Marbury power grab,  John Marshall.  And one who did as I pointed out at the time, lied through his teeth under oath during his confirmation hearing.   His succinct presentation of Roberts on the Voting Rights Act - which points out that it wasn't only the work of one Congress and one President but a number of them over decades IN WHICH SUPREME COURTS, AS WELL UPHELD ITS CONSTITUTIONALITY which the New Taney Court, the Roberts Court has overturned. 

Flash back to 2005 and it is apparent that, at best, Roberts misled the judiciary committee. In response to a question from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy about the VRA’s constitutionality, Roberts replied, “[T]he existing Voting Rights Act—the constitutionality has been upheld. And I don’t have any issue with that.”

In fact, Roberts had plenty of issues with the VRA. As a young lawyer serving as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan Administration, Roberts authored upward of twenty-five memos opposing the 1982 legislation. In them, Roberts urged the administration to defeat any proposed changes to the VRA and to keep the “intent test” established by a 1980 Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) that required VRA plaintiffs to prove officials explicitly intended to discriminate against minority voters. Adopting the effects test over the intent test, Roberts argued, would create “a quota system [akin to affirmative action] for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation on elected governmental bodies.”

Despite young Roberts’s warnings, the 1982 amendments were passed by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support by a vote of 389 to 24 in the House and 85 to 8 in the Senate. President Reagan quickly reversed course and signed the amendments into law on June 29, 1982. In 2006, Congress extended the VRA for another twenty-five years with even greater bipartisan support, by a vote of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate.

The Roberts Court is not a court of brilliant thinkers,  whether you count Gorsuch or Alito as it's majoritarian brain trust,  though I think Sotomayor and Brown Jackson might count as such.  I think the overestimated Kagan is a deeper thinker than anyone on the majority.   They certainly don't have more expertise in the "meaning" of the Constitution - whatever you take that to mean - than the many members of Congresses and even a few of the presidents* who had a hand in the Voting Rights Act as it stood before the Roberts six fascists destroyed it.

Bill Blum finished his review of the racist lying and hypocrisy of Roberts with this:

To accomplish any significant reforms, however, will require Democrats to stiffen their spines and to take back both houses of Congress later this year and the presidency in 2028. In the meantime, we can take heart that the long con Roberts started in 2005 has been exposed for all to see. And we can heed the call of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie to remind ourselves that Roberts and his GOP confederates do not own the future of the Constitution. We do.

I hate to break this to Bill Blum but NO, we don't.  The history of the long struggle for equality, alone, the hardest won victory in which it took the Civil War to get such basics as voting equality and equality before the law into the law was overturned by the Supreme Court using the Marbury power in 1883.   Even more was taken away the next decade in the Plessey decision and the long series of racist actions by the Fuller Court.

We have just had the Supreme Court using that same power to nullify the modern Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts - PLURAL - in exactly the same ways.   There is no guarantee that some future Roberts or Fuller or Waite or Taney Court won't abolish the next Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts in exactly the same way unless those Democratic Congresses and Presidents abolish by action and not by the almost certain to never be enacted Constitutional Amendments the Marbury power once and for all. 

The premise of such an action is as simple as pointing out there is no such power given to the Supreme Court by the text of the Constitution and there were framers of the original document who were totally opposed to courts having such power.   And that fact puts the lie to the majorities' "judicial philosophies" that go by the lying names of "originalism" and "textualism."   Such a power appears nowhere in the text of the document.  

Not that they won't lie about that, lying is the mother tongue of these People, Constitutionality included. 

Roger Taney lied about the citizenship of Black People at the time of the adoption of the Constitution to claim they were never intended to be citizens and any future Taney or Roberts will just lie in coming up with such nullifications in the future.  

The only way to make eglitarian democracy safe from its greatest proven enemy,  the U.S. Supreme Court is to strip it of that usurped power.   That will be a lot easier to get than that Constitutional amendment which will have to pass through the reliably white-supremacist state legislatures - something that Louis Boudin pointed out more than a hundred fifteen years ago and which is as true today.  Maybe truer.  And unless it is done you can't rely on the status of duly adopted laws being protected even by a "blue tsunami."   Even if Democrats packed the court in that way,  there is nothing to keep a future Roberts Court from knocking those down.  Future Congresses being dangerous is probably a lesser danger and a lesser certainty than that a future Court will be as bad as most of those in our history have been.  The historical record of congresses and Courts prove that the Courts have been the greater danger.   To us and, ironically, considering the excuse for inventing that power, the written Constitution. 

* I think Johnson's view of the Constitution which didn't rest in law-school lore but in about the sharpest and most experience-based knowledge of what the law means in the lives of poor people was about the most realistic one.  The Constitution isn't what law scholars proclaim about it or what the framers claimed about it, it is what it does to us here in the United States and People around the world.   If Johnson hadn't been talked into the disaster of the Vietnam War he would have been one of the three greatest presidents, along with FDR and Lincoln.   If Biden hadn't been suckered into doing Israel's bidding, he would have been remembered far better than he's going to be.   He might have succeeded and been succeeded by someone who didn't destroy everything. 

See Also

 

I've heard for years that pro-golfers had the highest percentage of fascist assholes in professional sports.  I've seen nothing in my lifetime to dissuade me of that.  

I Need More Tennessee Brando In My Life - "I'm so tired of living among idiots."

 

On the other hand there's something to be said about the gullible and stupid removing themselves from the breeding population - and I don't mean on account of their "genes," I mean them having a direct parental influence on their kids. 

I could go into the role that social-science, especially junk like evo-psy and bio-anny have on this once it gets into the unfiltered general kulcha.    It's a lot like the old he-man stuff that was a product of popular Darwinism, the stuff they published in pulp like Argosy,  what happens when people take junk science as seriously as they take sci-fi.  And an astonishingly large number of college graduates, even those with MS and PhD's in things you would guess would familiarize them with real science don't seem to be able to make those distinctions.  

The social-sciences and mainstream science based on things that cannot and never will be observable are to reality what reading the Scriptures as if they were science and history is to reality.    And BOTH are given all the rights and privileges as the real thing in the law and in life.   If it's as dangerous as junk history,  manifest destiny, neo-Confederacy, American exceptionalism, the founders fetish and the cult of the Constitution,  I don't know but I do know that suckers for one of the above are as often as not suckers for others in this list.  Italian fascism,  Nazism were products of the same trend as is Putinism in Russia.    I'm tempted to go into the basis of a romantic view of the classical period and the relationship of neo-classicism to 1930s and 40s fascism but I'll set off my resident troll if I do that.   Romanticism of the past is as stupid as the popular-manly view of Darwinism and notions of natural selection and its only, perhaps, somewhat more scientific conception of sexual selection.   Modern fascism is based in both as surely as 16th and 17th century notions of sovereignty were.  All of them are a danger to us. 

Time

 took me out on another bad date last night.   

I just can't wait to see what the day's going to bring. 

Put A Pin In This To See If The Roberts Court Sides With the Child Porn Manufacturers Over The Rights Of Children And Women

 

"Free speech" is an interesting object of study in regard to the "civil liberties" industry - heavily funded by porn interests and corporate media - the shifting stands of America's fascists from anti-porn absolutism to them being the biggest fattest "free-speechers" in the world and what utter dupes and suckers America's liberals and leftists have been as they weaponized "free speech" championed by the old-line, mostly affluent-white-male liberals and lefties to lie us into fascism.

The old conservative, generally Republican opponents of "free speech" absolutism over the issues of porn and lefty political speech were a real force in the United States up into the 1970s with vestiges of them perhaps still around.   The ones who had a real effect on the law and politics back before they gave way to the law-school academics, their students who got on federal courts and have now come to control the Supreme Court.  Those who saw the golden opportunity handed to them by liberals on earlier courts which they have used the "RIGHT TO LIE" to allow the billionaires, foreign as well as domestic, and big media to lie us into Republican-fascism and Trumpian Imperial rule.   

The Roberts Court is staffed by those who know that their ideology can only keep power as long as the lies and bigotry financed by billionaires and millionaires keep their fellow Republican-fascists in power.   They don't care one bit for the lives of children, no more than the Trump regime does, they've green-lighted Trump's harm to all of us, not excluding children.  They are nothing to the Roberts Court majority as compared to their hold on power and the money they can steal - the Roberts Court majority is in on that theft as clearly as John Marshall and Roger Taney were on the profiting from slavery.    And, these days, he biggest profiteers from porn from Murdoch to Musk, are making money off of those products that come from "free speech absolutism."   It's a self-financed racket, the Courts First Amendment rulings a cog in that machine.    The First Amendment lawyers and rackets like the ACLU part of that, too. 

Lies are what fueled the latest "will rise again" of America's indigenous fascism the lies that media magnification and repetition and all of the tools of persuasion that have been invented and tested by the PR industry,  "free speech" lying fully and with enormous effectiveness that all of the "more speech" imagined by the "civil liberties" lawyer-liars and the clearly professionally interested liberal media liberals promoted as the weapon against that have proved to be about as impotent as any such nonsense has ever been. 

I don't exactly remember the first time I transgressed that in a major way in one of these pieces, but this one was early in that development.   The news story that led to it was the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court throwing out a lawsuit by a mother whose daughter had been hounded to commit suicide by a bunch of mean-girls in her school WHO HAD BEEN ENCOURAGED TO DO IT BY THE MOTHER OF ONE OF THEM.   The issue that the Massachusetts Court threw it out on was that it was the "free speech" right of the malignant mother and the girls she had encouraged to hound the girl to her death.   

And now they could do it with pictures as well as social media messages thanks to Elon Musk and "AI".   I don't know which ap that the girls used to do that more than sixteen years ago, perhaps it was the one that Zuckerberg invented to rank girls on the Harvard campus.  

I think it was an earlier post that led to the first firestorm of indignation I got on this issue, alas, the comments that I recall so vividly aren't there anymore.  I remember a good number of those were due to my dissing one of the idols of old-line liberal piety when I said this:

The most important right that children have is to the protection of adults, their parents, their community and the world. For children that is more important than the entire Bill of Rights. Without it they have no life and no chance to pursue their own happiness free of deception and the worst forms of abuse. They have a right not to be lied to by mass media. This is so clear that it shouldn't ever have gotten lost. It might be prettied up in legal nice talk but too many law professors, judges lawyers and the constitutional purity industry have chosen corporate profits over the protection of children. Theories of freedom of the press concerning commercial speech are part of it. And that's over. If they insist on presenting my choice as between children's safety and Lady Chatterly's Lover, the book goes.

That Lady Chatterly's Lover is a piece of crap has nothing to do with it.   If it was a work of genius* it still isn't anything compared to the life of a child.  And  I don't think that D. H. Lawrence's proto-fascism, racism and eugenics is irrelevant.   I don't think it's a complete coincidence that the champions of that and other such books (such as Last Exit To Brooklyn) gave America's fascists their golden opportunity,  I think that the number of such coincidences in the development of America's freest "press" in history and America's fall from the height of our legal equality with the Voting Rights Act to our neo-Apartheid period can credibly be  held to be a coincidence.   NOT WHEN SO MUCH OF IT COMES FROM THE SAME LAWYERS, JUDGES AND "justices" AS HAD A HAND IN BOTH.  

The weirdness of mid-20th century liberalism and its remnants today and the unintended role that those have played in the implosion of American democracy is told in such stands and those for whom those stands were really mounted.   

I have pointed out here before that a number of such lawyers who made a profession of such "free speech" absolutism turned out to be total hypocrites,  Ephraim London filing the lawsuit to ruin Mary McCarthy for telling the truth about the AS Seen On TV "free speech" champion Lillian Hellman, that she was a flagrant liar.  I've also pointed out that I once pointed out that Alan Dershowitz (whose vaunted "free speech" advocacy was a series of cases he did for figures in the porn industry) was also a liar, a torture advocate turned genocide apologist who sought to suppress the accurate accusation of his own lies and plagiarisms through threatening the same tactics that Hellman and London used. 

"Free speech-press" as those are nearly universally defined is one of the most stupidly absurd concepts in common currency, especially when presented as the supreme and absolute value, held to have such power that it overrides literally every demonstrated instance in which it harms and kills that it is a danger to life and every other right.   I do blame the drafters of the First Amendment for a lot of that, putting it first, including a corporate entity which cannot have rights, "the press," not differentiating between the right to tell the truth and that there is no such thing as a right to lie, etc.   

And it is something that has been turned into an unthinking idol through rote repetition of the phrase in that context that that idolatry turns it into a real danger to the lives of millions and billions.  Especially when matched with the real and genuine creation of a material idol, the Baal of America, "corporate person-hood."    

Corporations have no rights, they are not natural born creatures, they are not human beings, only humans have rights and no right is unbounded outside of a context of moral responsibilities to other living beings.  Humans.   Our law is so dangerously stupid that it can't make those distinctions and refuses to acknowledge the clearly catastrophic consequences of them. 

And People have their lives ruined, their reputations ruined, their lives ended as a consequence of that. 

*  In that other piece I mentioned Ulysses, one of the other idols of such idolatry,  Though I think Joyce really peaked with Dubliners.   If it were necessary to sacrifice every work of fiction to bring about egalitarian democracy, I'd go farther than what Joseph Brodsky said in this famous three way with George Steiner and Mary McCarthy.   "As a human being and not as a writer the first thing I would say that if you give me a choice between let's say democracy and Solzhenitsyn,  I say democracy."

I think Brodsky's life experience gave him much clearer insight into what's really at stake than almost any living Western intellectual, writer, scribbler, lawyer, judge "justice" is likely to have.   White, straight, and most of all, affluent males, especially.   I have to say I really miss Mary McCarthy style intellectuals.  I'd never have thought I'd miss that kind of discussion at the time. 

Shameless Me - Hate Mail

THERE IS NO PODCASTER alive whose career is worth Democrats losing an election to a Republican-fascist, there is no one in the media, even a real journalist who tells the truth who is worth that and Hasan Piker is no reporter.    He's a publicity seeking, big-mouth, sometimes foul-mouth blatherer who a lot of callow lefties are making into the kind of hill to die on , the kind that has cost the American left and Democrats far too much in the past.    Some of those were arguably worth taking a stand on, such as the lesser items of the separation of church and state - though the temporary victories over that have resulted in a Supreme Court which has nullified that separation.   Whatever victories were won cost entirely more than they were worth and, on that count, turned out to be less than futile.   I could have lived with the offense of a tacky manger scene on the town green a lot better than the Republican Congresses, Presidents and Supreme Courts.  And I'm opposed to them putting those on public property. 

I've already said that my honor and reputation isn't worth risking the loss of a town council seat to a worse candidate,  if I cared about my reputation and . . .  you really think what I'm doing here for free is a "career"?  If I cared about that I wouldn't transgress whatever limits and break any taboo I think it's necessary to break.  I certainly wouldn't have become a critic of Darwinism,  a critic of materialist- atheist-scientism .  .  . the power usurped by the Supreme Court to nullify duly adopted federal law and said numerous other lesser forbidden things if I cared at all about that. 

I don't bother with lefties who take such clearly pointless stands,  they too often turn out to be last stands.  And, having seen his act,  I wouldn't count on Piker to not turn on us as things develop.  His irresponsibility in allowing his act to risk anything in real life is all the evidence I need to suspect that.   

Of Course I Loved Dolly Parton

She was a national treasure, an international one.  A radiant  humanitarian and philanthropist,  a promoter of education and literacy, someone who supported the development of Covid vaccines, saving who knows how many lives, as well as being a brilliant songwriter and singer and actress.   She was a great comic actress.  I'll always remember when early in the Covid lock-down she said, "I'll bet after about six months of this you'll be begging Jolene to take your man."  

I remember early in the period when her start was taking off, one of the classical singing teachers I knew said that the People who made fun of her for her chesty outfits and slutty costumes were fools,  "She knows exactly what she's doing, she's no one's fool," is what I remember him saying.   He also noted she really knew how to use her voice and the length of her singing career is proof of that. 

I've had an unexpected family crisis and a health crisis of my own spring up over night.  I may be out for a while, I don't know.   It's not looking good.   

Bad Day - Here's Mary Trump and Wajahat Ali On Why Jeffries Has To Go

 

If there's one thing I have to agree with Mary Trump on other than that Jeffries has failed the test is I don't care about frickin' Hasan Piker MAKING HIS DEFENSE A HILL TO DIE ON IS IDIOTIC.   HE'S A FRICKIN' TIC-TOC FIGURE.   

If anyone is ever tempted to risk losing a minor town council race to defend me,   I can do that all by myself, win the fucking election.   That Piker hasn't said the same thing proves he is an egomaniac who doesn't deserve support. 

Israel Is Coming Up With A New Excuse For Targeting Palestinian Children For Murder

 

Roberts Ratfucks The Mid-Terms Like I Told You He And His Fascist - Five Would

THE CONSTITUTIONAL MYTH is that elections are under the control of the states.   I've heard that my entire life and I'm old.  I've heard it in a civics class in high school when they used to actually teach stuff in school, that much of it was BS doesn't change that.  I've read it over and over again by so-called constitutional experts teachers, lawyers, judges, "justices."   I'm sure the six fascists on the Roberts Court would mouth that lie piously right now, as they proved it was a lie by their actions. 

Now the Roberts Court who I've been telling you have been intending to ratfuck the mid-terms as the Rehnquist Court did the 2000 election ONLY THE ROBERTS COURT HAS BEEN DOING SO FAR EARLIER AND FAR MORE BOLDLY AND OPENLY has made it clear that's what they intend to do by letting Trump and his goons rig the election,  surely it's time to stop pretending that all of that civics class, constitutional scholarship bullshit was never more than one crooked Court majority from being overturned on behalf of overt and obvious anti-democratic corruption was bullshit.

My biggest fear isn't that the Roberts Court will go farther along that before the mid-terms THEY WILL.   They will because they are the most corrupt members of the most corrupt branch of the government in our history.   They will because, like Adams and Marshall who had just gotten booted out of power, they know that their party has fucked over the large majority of Americans, and they don't have much of a hope of winning decisive power unless they and their goons around the country corrupt the elections. 

My greatest fear is that there will be that Democratic tsunami and the likes of Jeffries and Schumer and other Democratic leader-lawyers will chicken out on ripping the source of this corruption from the Supreme Court.  My greatest fear is that once the Court has been expanded (we will need it to be a clear-eyed, non-sentimental, hardass Democratic president in office and a similar Democratic majority in the Senate) to dilute the fascists or the fascist majority has been retired to senior judge status (assuming the Supremes don't hold that to be "unconstitutional" which they'll try,  HINT: "unconstitutional" means nothing and it hasn't since 1803) that the Ivy-law trained lawyers will reassert the Marbury power-grab and the president and Congress will chicken out. 

I hope that Democratic House members tell Jeffries if he is selling Democrats out that he's out.   I don't believe his claims about telling Jared Kuschner that he's gunning for him.   I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt for the first years of his leadership but he's shown no leadership that I can see.   I think he's your typical lawyer.  And I don't trust them until they prove to me they can be trusted.   That should be held to be an entirely rational occupational hazard for that profession.   They are trained to lie, it's the unusual ones who won't.   As can be seen from who has controlled the courts for the past four decades,  they are rewarded in that profession by being the biggest liars. 

Under The Present Corruption An Amendment To Fix Things Is As Ineffective As The 14th Amendment Was Under Court Manipulation - Doing It By Statute Even More So

HOW DEGENERATE is American conservatism that so many of the "principled conservatives" could still be members of the party that brought us, first Bush II and now Trump II?   

I know there were some for whom Trump I was too much at the start and I will acknowledge them getting out of the filthy, criminal racket that the Republican Party had already become in 2015, the year that Jeb Bush began to discover that the party his father and brother had controlled and formed had developed to such a state of decadence that it was too far along in fascist degeneracy to choose  his style of aristocratic oligarch.   The year it came under the complete control of the tech billionaire promoted,  "reality" TV imitation master of business, Trump.  

Or maybe, getting those tax breaks, themselves, they're more OK with it than you might think.    By the way, I think that explains the actions of the New York Times since about 2000, so they're not alone in that. 

 I don't believe any of the Bush family left the burning hazardous waste site that their party had become, largely under the stewardship of their own family and those allied to them.   Maybe the Bushes have come of age and figure they don't need to be the ones with the titles of government, having joined the oligarchs that are kingmakers, the kind who come out of elite preps that put out those who don't need to pretend to work for a living.   They are just the kind to be that delusional.   They are not the only ones living in dangerous delusion. 

I listened to this discussion by John Harwood with Norm Ornstein, only because it was put out under the Zeteo brand.   I listened to the reasoning of Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute a "principled conservative" and it's clear that even after seeing the catastrophic decay that his folks on the Supreme Court and in Congress have brought us to, he's got all kinds of ideas for patch jobs that he imagines will bring us back to the status quo conditions of the Reagan era.   

That is delusional, there is no going back to any of that,  the Gingrich-Hastert House and subsequent ones,  Republican courts, the  McConnell-Thune Senate, the Rehnquist-Roberts Courts, the Bush II and Trump presidencies . . . HOW CAN ANY AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OF ANY SENSIBILITY NOT SEE THAT THOSE ARE WHAT GOT US HERE.   And those are the product of trends that go back a lot farther IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY than the 1990s.    

I would not be dishonest enough to claim that I'm anything like that species of coward or idiot held up as if they were avitars of virtue, the "non-partistan" though,  as you can read whenever I write about these things,  I have admitted that there were a number of the ever dwindling number of Democratic appointments to the Supreme Court whose foolish decisions based in libertarian notions of freedom, especially in the privilege given to the corporate media to lie and to carry lies, and also Democrats in elected office who, as well, carry the idea that such proven poisons of equality and democracy are some kind of civic virtue due to the idiotic wording of the First Amendment.   But the Democratic Party has not been the problem in this, the Republican Party has been in paving our road to degeneracy, much of it in the name of such civic virtue based in asinine and proven disasters like "classical liberalism" "libertarianism" Constitutional "originalism" "textualism". . . 

Looking more into Ornstein and his ilk in an admittedly slap dash way, looking at that risky "source" which I only use as a source when I lack the time to look in depth, Wikipedia,  I see that Ornstein has been a consultant in drafting a piece of model legislation to fix the corruptions that the Republican Supreme Court has baked into the real constitution of the United States, the one the Court creates anew whenever a majority on it decides to.   That legislation is named rather hopefully The American Anti-Corruption Act the wiki article on it, no doubt written by those who wrote it and advocate it says 

Its provisions cover three areas:

Stop political bribery by overhauling lobbying and ethics laws

End secret money by dramatically increasing transparency

Fix our broken elections by ending gerrymandering and modernizing voting and election funding laws.

The AACA's authors state that its provisions are based on existing laws that have withstood court challenges, and are therefore constitutional.

Oh, yeah, just like the Voting Rights Act,  various acts establishing independent regulatory agencies,  Roe v Wade, upheld by the Court repeatedly over decades.   It is hopelessly naive, STUPIDLY NAIVE AND DENYING OF HOW DANGEROUS THE COURT AND MANY LOWER COURTS ARE .  It's exactly the kind of thing that the kinds of well-connected, credentialed, "vetted" hacks of the kind that staff groups that come up with such stuff will come up with.

How silly can a bunch of guys in white shirts and ties get?  

Theirs is a program which is hopeless and hopelessly naive, middle-of-the-road, acceptable to the sensibilities of a dutiful  and scrupulous PBS or NPR or C-Span audience member,  the kind of thing I imagine an Aaron Sorkin or a Ripon Society member (are there any left?) to take seriously.

That wiki article contrasts that effort with what I think is only a somewhat less naive though far more reality based attempt that calls for something far more seemingly realistic but ultimately as futile, Move to Amend, which calls for Constitutional Amendments getting rid of two of the greatest Supreme Court created corruptions of the United States, law and politics,  "corporate personhood" and "money is speech."   I acknowledge the wisdom of Move to Amend for identifying those two central Court created corruptions,  there are others.   I think they believe this is only a start.

But as I have been noting here for the past month,  there have been Acts of Congress, acts passed into state law by state legislatures,  THERE HAVE BEEN MONUMENTAL CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS to correct the corruptions baked into our Constitution (even hacks like Ornstein admit that the Electoral College is one of those) and those imposed by the Court,  the Civil War Amendments, and when corrupt "justices" on the Court want to they mow them down or "interpret" even the most plainly readable parts of the Constitution to achieve their own law-making and breaking from the bench.  I will note that even the author of the Wiki article on the Ornstein side admits that such provisions as they propose to correct our corruption is already under attack from the judiciary and is subject to overturning by Republican-fascist governors. 

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We aren't going to fix it by "regular means."  

The United States is such a myth enthralled country that we don't even admit what's obvious from the lives we lead such as THE FACT THAT WE ARE NOT RULED BY A WRITTEN CONSTITUTION ANYMORE THAN BRITAIN IS,  we are governed by the one the Supreme Court makes up and changes at the whim of a majority and the Courts that have sat for the past half a century have become ever more extreme in that practice.   I have put the tipping point in various places though milestones are a better physcal analogy.   Bush v Gore is certainly one of the more dramatic ones, maybe the last one that could have still passed as being the most extreme of regular Court actions,  though I'd say it had already passed the line before the Roberts Court destruction in Trump v USA.   Bush's opponent was the winner of the Presidential vote, Trump's is the entire country and the Roberts Court sided with Trump.

In many ways we are at a lot more danger because we don't admit that with the power the Court invented for itself to be the ultimate and unappealable definer of the Constitution, of the constitutionality of the actions of the ELECTED branches of the Government,  that our written Constitution is the malleable thing of wax that Jefferson said Marshall et al had made it.   British Constitutionality with its constant court remaking of the thing is prepared to deal with a Court that goes too far, just as it could theoretically and probably effectively deal with a monarch that goes too far.   I have no doubt that Elizabeth and Charles know full well if they acted unconstitutionally, it would put their position in peril in a way that the Roberts Court has made out of the question in the United States - we dangerously put the head of state and the head of government in the same head, just one of the other defects in our Constitutional system of allegedly "balanced powers."    John Adams, often credited as the author of that notion of the three branches bragged late in his life that his greatest contribution to the American People was his installation of John Marshall as Chief Justice, in an act which, as I noted last week, was designed by him and Marshall and others as a means of him insuring the rule of his party after the Voters had ended their period in power.  By the time Adams said that it was clear that overturning by the Voters was permanent.   

The evils that best us really do trace back to the earliest years under the Constitution and the drafting of that document, itself. Nothing short of a democratic AN EGALIATARIAN DEMOCRATIC Congress and president ending the Supreme Court's self-created power to nullify duly adopted laws and parts of the Constitution as it chooses is going to fix it.   Many of those evils sprang from the mind of Adams and the other framers.   Others were imposed through Adams' and Washington's Court appointments.   You're not going to fix it by means we have been sold as "regular".   The Court has to be made safe for a country of laws and not of five or more black robed Ivy-League law schooled gangsters.