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 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.
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 go 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 which took the Civil Wart 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 nulllify the 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.
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