When the prophet says that God wants us to DO justice, he understands the word in a broad sense. It is justice that is done with kindness, justice that is rendered sensitive by mercy, justice that is not symbolized by a blindfolded woman holding scales but by a stranger, like the Good Samaritan who sees someone in need and is moved to help him.
In order to live up to the Biblical ideal of justice and mercy we need, as Micah puts it, to walk humbly with our God, that is to be aware of God's presence in our life and to have some sense of His greatness, but also of his compassionate mercy. The humility that is the inevitable result of such an awareness helps us to overcome our tendency to be focused on our own concerns so that we see neither our failings nor the needs of others.
To the typical college-educated American, today the narrow, legalistic conception of justice, as defined by the dictates of the Supreme Court and lower courts, perhaps through the lens of listening to Horace Rumpole hold force on justice as that blind statue holding scales. This concept of justice will seem foreign and strange, the propaganda of secularism in the past century will have given it a sense of dangerousness, risking, Oh, Justicia help us!, religion as a real force in peoples' lives and in American society. But American history, the struggle for justice for Black People, Native People, Women, working People, People with no money, immigrants, when viewed through the primary documentation of those movements proves that it wasn't done through a narrow, legalistic interpretation of the goddamned Constitution (which was written as a document ensuring inequality and injustice) but by the religious imagination of people who found the status-quo under that document to be unacceptable exactly because it didn't come up to the standard of The Law of Moses, the Prophets and The Gospel of Jesus. I have had to point out to the secularists, even those who aren't atheists, that when the escaped slaves, the slaves in bondage expressed their resistance to slavery, it wasn't through invocations of Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton, all of them slave holders, it was to The Bible. I will guarantee you that the resistance of any group to oppression under the present and future interpretation of the American Constiution will not be reliably done through the invocation of the Founders or even the friggin' Supreme Court, it won't be done through the self-interested conniving scribblings of commie friendly secularist scribes and lawyers (Pharisees) or right wing-fascism, it will be done through religion as found in the Scriptures.
The American Constitution minus that religious agitation (and it will never be anything but religious) for the extra-Constitutional force that keeps the depravity intentionally placed in the Constitution at bay will produce the kind of situation we are in now. That has always been the case as an be seen from the history where we went from domination by slave-power in coalition with Northern money interests, through the very brief period of the calamity of the Civil War, to the very brief era of Reconstruction before, through the Constitutional prop of injustice on behalf of slavery and money interests, the Electoral College, The Constitution gave the country Rutherford Hayes and the beginning of Jim Crow, which instituted American Apartheid, including de-facto slavery until another, very brief period which has pretty much ended as, for a brief time, the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution a bit differently. That period is definitively over as the Republican-fascists are now in charge of what the Court rules on the Constitution.
I agree with practically everything Robert Reich says in this brief video that declares what I've been saying all along, the Constitutional Crisis is here, in full force, now.
But the Constitutional Crisis that Reich and I both agree is here was there from the beginning because the Constitution was written to ensure that real justice won't happen. The same court, under Earl Warren, which overturned official Jim Crow, sowed the seeds of the Republican-fascist backlash with its foolish permission for the mass media, owned by rich Republicans, to lie with impunity about the opponents of fascism. As I've pointed out many times you can see that in the line of presidential elections surrounding that 1964 ruling. Richard Nixon, who innaugurated the backlash against that brief period of something more like justice, lost in 1960. The ruling was made in 1964 and Nixon lied his way into office in 1968. The secular left, the ACLU and others, including the New York Times, sought and lauded that permission to lie which, steadily, over the next fifty-two years, led to Trump lying himself into the presidency where he is installing overt fascism of the type which Reich doesn't name but which I have.
The same Supreme Court that made lies the most powerful force in our politics also was rather blatantly anti-religious in about as stupid a way as could have been cooked up in Republican-fascist think tanks, by giving atheists and others a series of symbolic and idiotic rulings that did so much to make liberalism ballot box poison. I really don't think very much of the wisdom of the Warren Court and such liberals who got roped in on those. Their priorities are so seriously screwed up that either they were in on it or they were and are really stupid in that regard, their hostility to religion ruling their heads. Liberals who continue with that are the stupidest of political chumps, having the electoral history of the past sixty years to see how pointless and unimportant that artificial replacement for a scruple is. I'd prefer that the government be entirely neutral in matters of church-state but it's somewhere lower in my priorities than the offensiveness of having "In God We Trust" turning every coin that carries it into a neo-pagan idol.
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