Hate Mail

AS SOON AS I READ about the decision in the Buckley v. Valeo case which overturned the bi-partisan clean elections laws passed to prevent another crime spree such as Nixon and his campaign and his Department of "justice" had engaged in through his Attorney General who, I'll remind you, went to jail because of his crimes,  as soon as I heard the Court had overturned it ON THE BASIS OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT, INVENTING THE HUGE WHOPPER OF A LIE THAT MONEY EQUALS SPEECH, I became a complete and dedicated opponent of the Supreme Court usurpation in which they gave themselves the "right" to nullify duly adopted federal laws.  That was fifty years ago last winter.  

And, once I started researching the issue, you can bet I got into arguments about it. 

"But what about Brown v. Board of Education," was one of the early retorts. 

Brown v Board was not overturning a federal law, was the immediate answer.  Though as I learned more about the actual effect of Brown in the erection of private white-flight academies in which the affluent put their children so they would not go to school with Black Children, something that state governments and Republican dominated Supreme Courts have supported with voucher laws and other means of getting private schools funded with money that should go only to public schools which have to accept anyone have become a thing.   

I have not studied the issue of where the members of the Supreme Court, their children, grandchildren etc. have gone to school but I would not be surprised if such a study didn't show that the large majority of them didn't send them to public schools or that they'd not attended public schools, themselves.  The majority on today's Court have not.  I would go into that but it would get me on a tirade against the moral atrocity of elite Catholic preps and the Ivys who have turned out so many of the worst of them. 

There were other "what abouts" none of which answered the problem of what Boudin called "government by a few conservative men" on the Supreme Court - as I noted even one of those conservative men, Nathan Clifford predicted the atrocity of the Court dominating the People and even the Congress - it does so whenever it overturns a duly enacted federal law.   

As the history of the 14th Amendment under Court "interpretation" proves,  even the Constitution, itself, is not safe from the de facto power the Court gives itself to nullify parts of it.   If they had not done so within the last three years,  Trump would not be president we would almost certainly not have gone from being a respected world power to being one of the most hated countries in the world and we would not have gone from the most successful measures to revive the welfare of the People from the Covid-19 mini-depression of all developed countries to being the country which is driving large parts if not the entire global economy into a depression that may make the Great one look not so great by comparison.   We would certainly not be at war with Iran with a president who is Putin's bitch boy. 

As can be seen in the posts this week, even the "justice" who favored the power before the Constitution, Iredell, had reservations about the kind of use of it that has become routine. 

And then there are those state Supreme Court justices and their legal erudition.

I mentioned the status of Women and their ownership of their own bodies in the wake of the Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, which it had whittled down in previous rulings before they did what several of them claimed they wouldn't do during their confirmation - all of them lied through their teeth during their confirmations and every single person in the room and almost all of those listening to the festival of mendacity that Senate confirmation hearings have become knew it too - lying like Todd Blanche did and the Republican-fascists will confirm him, anyway, as they did Kavanaugh. 

In that case the Roberts court fascists overturned a Supreme Court decision that overturned state laws in favor of the fact that either you own your own body or every goddamned right mentioned in the goddamned "Bill of Rights" means not a damned thing - EXACTLY THE SAME THING AT STAKE IN THE CONSTITUTION AND THE COURT PERMITTING SLAVERY.

In fact they didn't just overturn the ruling made by the Court by 7-2 in 1973, they overturned every court that upheld the Roe decision.   While my argument here doesn't deal directly with the matter of the Court overturning the rulings of previous courts - even those that acknowledge the right of half of the population to the ownership of their own bodies A TINY LITTLE MATTER LEFT OUT OF THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION BY THE SLAVE-HOLDERS, SLAVE TRADERS AND PROFITEERS FROM SLAVERY WHO WERE, IN FACT THE FRAMERS,  for obvious reasons.  It would have cost them their enormous wealth - and America's slavers were some of the wealthiest in the world - and they might have had to earn an honest living from their own labor.  

But the matter of a Supreme Court overruling a previous Court's decision, especially those claimed to have been made on the basis of the Courts interpretation of the Constitution - and in the large majority of cases on either a clearly ideological basis or in the Courts and their patrons' political and financial interests, though neither Roe nor Brown v Board would have, in context fit into those categories, all of that brings up the issue of the validity of the Court being able to accurately discern the actual meaning of the Constitution in any reliable way.

I might consider that the thinking of Ketanji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor to be up to the standards of the majority on the court in 1973,  I hear Harry Litman say that he has great regard for the writing ability of Elena Kagan though I often don't think her thinking matches that, there isn't anyone else on this Court who is a first-rate thinker, they certainly aren't masters of rationation or logic.  As the Republican-fascists, the Federalist fascist Society, the billionaires and millionaires who have funded the effort have, as Sheldon Whitehouse said, "captured the court" the level of intelligence on the Court has certainly gone down, considerably.   John Roberts is about as banal a thinker as has been on the court and he's certainly not as bad as Alito, Thomas or Kavanaugh. 

What pretense is there that they were able to read the Constitution any nor insightfully or, FAR MORE IMPORTANTLY, HONSTELY than the majority in Roe?   You will remember that Alito and those who concurred with him had to resort to late medieval English judges who sentenced Women to burning as witches in coming up with his Constitutional fiction to overturn the case.   I would really love to know what the framers, who no doubt had a deep sense of disdain and shame for the Salem witch trials and the execution of and imprisonment that resulted from it, what those men of the "enlightenment" would make of Alito's (or, more likely his Ivy League law clerks') citation of such a judge in such a case.  Abortion was legal in the states at the time of the framing of the Constitution, by the way. 

If the Constitutional reading of the 7 "justices" who decided Roe, if the many more "justices" who confirmed and maintained it read the Constitution wrong, only to have the decidedly inferior minds of the Roberts Court find the "right" reading of it,  doesn't that, in itself, prove that there is something extremely dangerous in allowing them to maintain that THAT is their proper role?   And what is dangerous in them overturning a Court decision - and those overturnings have in some somewhat rarer instances expanded equality and freedom and the public good, just not very often - then it's far more dangerous to allow them to take the extra-Constitutional steps of nullifying duly passed laws made by the Congress and president. 

I absolutely and entirely reject that the members of the Supreme Court have a single "right" to do anything that the most humble and wretched person on Earth, American or not, has.   Holding public office isn't a right, it doesn't create rights, it imposes responsibilities freely taken on with the responsibility to The People that they do what the agreed to do.   The faster we get over the stupider uses of the word "rights" which have led to all kinds of evils, the better.   It is an outrage that any Supreme Court "justice" or president or Senator or member of the House believes that they have some enhanced status in terms of "rights" than the most common of common People any where on Earth.   Any respect that an office holder is considered to be "due" is misplaced.   It is a violation of the actual foundation of democracy to do so,  that foundation is equality not some notion of "liberty."  Freedom only comes through equality and knowing the truth.  And with freedom comes responsibilities, as well.