In the hearings into the confirmation of William Rehnquist to the Supreme court, the eminent civil rights lawyer Joseph L. Rauh and Clarence A. Mitchell from the NAACP testified that not that long before the hearings in 1971, Rehnquist was involved in a voter intimidation operation aimed at keeping Black People and Latinos from voting.* Rehnquist lied about that under oath and went on to do on the court pretty much what he was doing in 1960 when he was in charge of a Republican voting suppression operation in Arizona. And Republicans on the Supreme Court have increasingly been part of a similar effort, nationwide. Neil Gorsuch will be a key part in it, anyone the Federalist Society chooses for Trump to put on the court will.
The democratic remedy for a corrupt and unjust court, through some of the worst decisions of the far from purely motivated amateurs who set up the government, is extremely slow, unacceptably slow, and extremely awkward. It depends on voters who are fed up with an outrageously out of control court voting people into the Senate and a person as president who might get the chance, through death or retirement, appoint new members of the court. Which turns out to be hardly a sure thing or anything anyone can really rely on happening.** The fictitious remedy of impeachment has been used exactly once, exactly for political corruption in action on the court by Samuel Chase. The Senate refused to convict him and he remained on the court. In that one case it was used, it turned out to be no remedy at all.
The Republican-fascist strategy, going back almost sixty-years, has been to prevent even the possibility of that most difficult and far from certain remedy from happening by preventing Black People, Latinos, and others from voting, blocking the possibility of a remedy for even the most outrageous injustice and abuse of power from happening. Black People certainly are familar with that, it is exactly the same strategy that Southern AND OTHERS IN OTHER STATES used to prevent them from voting and having representation in the government in the entire period after slavery and in many places before.
It has been documented that The Republican Party has been practicing slave-holder tactics to maintain their power for the past fifty-eight years, the faction that did that now runs the entire Republican Party, the tiny handful who have managed to avoid direct participation in that, people like Susan Collins, are entirely complicit in the effort and they benefit from it.
The power that the Supreme Court gave itself, to overturn legislation duly adopted and signed into law, to overturn the emergency anti-corruption legislation such as that adopted after the crimes of Nixon's administration were engaged in with some of the richest and most powerful Americans, to overturn some of the hardest won laws such as the Voting Rights Act, literally bought with the blood of people demanding equal justice under the law, equal justice which the Supreme Court has proved throughout its history it is generally hostile to, makes the widespread acceptance often mute acceptance, of their expansive powers extremely dangerous. I have come to the conclusion that the Supreme Court we were all taught was the last, final hope of those who sought justice, you know, all of that Gideon's Trumpet romanticism, has, actually, for most of its history, including our present, has been exactly the opposite of that.
It is extremely ironic that a country in which the separation of church and state is embedded into our founding has come to have a reality that is far worse than the real history of clerical abuse of absolute power. Roma locuta; causa finita est, (Rome has spoken, the case is settled), was seldom the actual case in medieval and Renaissance Europe. But in the United States when a corrupt court, such as the one we have now and which is about to become far worse, has assumed essentially the same power that medieval Popes seldom actually had. And in the United States, the reality of that is a lot more real because there is no countering secular authority BECAUSE THE COURT IS THE SECULAR AUTHORITY.
The hesitation of the Senate Judiciary committee to not only question the honesty of nominees to the supreme court and to make such things as voting suppression an absolute disqualification for membership on the Supreme Court has been criminally irresponsible. So should be the form of lying under oath that virtually all of recent nominees have engaged in, the claim that they don't know how they will vote on specific issues. They almost always know how they will vote on things such as legalized abortion, civil rights cases, voting rights cases.
We are at the very limit of how we can maintain the fatal flaws contained in the Constitution and the exacerbations of those through things like the self-assumed powers of the Supreme Court. Every sign is that it is about to get a lot worse with Trump putting another Federalist Society Republican-fascist on the court. The line of rulings enabling and empowering slave holders under courts from John Marshall's to Roger Taney's led directly to the flames of the Civil War. The fire next time will be worse.
* Here is how it was reported in the New York Times
An Arizona Republican leader confirmed today that William. H. Rehnquist one of President Nixon's nominees to the Supreme Court, was an official in 1960 and 1964 of a Republican program to challenge voters at polling places in Phoenix.
Wayne E. Legg, a Phoenix lawyer who is a liaison man between the state and county Republican units in Arizona, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Rehnquist had directed a “ballot security” program that sent challengers into heavily Democratic precincts.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on his nomination last week, civil rights spokesmen charged that the challenging program had been a tactic of “harassment and intimidation” desiged to delay and prevent voting in Negro and Mexican‐American precincts.
Mr. Rehnquist testified that he had never personally challenged anyone at the polls, as the Arizona chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asserted in a resolution opposing his nomination.
His testimony was not clear as to whether he had ever had any role in training and directing the challengers, and some persons understood him to be saying that his only connection with the challenging operation had been to act as head of a “lawers committee” that advised challengers of their legal rights.
Mr. Rehnquist testified, “My responsibilities, as I recall them, were never those of a challenger, but as one of a group of lawyers working for the Republican party in Maricopa County who attempted to supply legal advice to persons who were challengers, and I was chairman of what was called the Lawyers Committee in a couple of elections, biennial elections, which I believe were in the early sixties.”
Today the offices of Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Democrats who have questioned Mr. Rehnquist closely about his civil rights views, released copies of news clippings from Phoenix newspapers saying that Mr. Rehnquist was head of the Lawyers Committee in 1962 but was an official of the challenging program in 1960 and 1964.
The Arizona Republic on Oct. 21, 1964, carried an announcement by Mr. Legg, then chairman of the Maricopa County Republican party, that Mr. Rehnquist had been named “chief ballot security officer” for the upcoming election. Mr. Legg said that in 1960 Mr. Rehnquist was co‐chairman of the ballot security program, which Mr. Legg describes as a program to “challenge voters in some of the precincts in which claimed irregularities have occurred in the past.”.
As can be seen, the strategy of Republicans trying to suppress the vote among Black and Latino People started a long time before Nixon launched his Southern Strategy of appealing to racists who were furious with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Those are who are now in control of the Republican Party. As history shows, the almost always useless Senate Judiciary Committee were too chicken or too dainty to really deal with the issue and Rehnquist went on the court and, later, to become one of the worst Chief Justices in a long line of bad ones.
The court has become a machine for disenfranchising Black People, Latino People, poor People, and others who poll as more likely to vote for Democrats.
** Actually, in the original Constitution it was worse, they had to elect members of state legislatures who would then appoint Senators. Anyone who claims that the friggin' founders' ideas for the protection of democracy from a partisan, even despotic court were brilliant is a goddamned idiot and a liar. It was one of the worst features of the Constitution, among many others which have proved to be very useful for Courts bent on preventing democracy, to prevent us from ever having that ability to oust such Court members.
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