The recent rulings by our political hacks on the Supreme Court have ripped into the very foundation of our beloved nation….and sadly this session is only the beginning of the dismantling.
Disastrous rulings are crippling the process we call democracy….
No single day has better captured the current state of the Supreme Court than Thursday. At 10 a.m., the court issued a devastating assault on the Biden administration’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases in a 6–3 ruling joined by all of the court’s reactionary block. Ten minutes later, it issued a 5–4 opinion that just barely confirmed that the president, rather than a rogue judge in Texas, has authority over border policy, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh lending the lone votes preventing an absolutely insane outcome. Shortly thereafter, the court issued a bombshell orders list that tees up, for next term, one of the most important and dangerous democracy cases in American history, which asks whether state legislatures have near-unlimited authority over election laws.
The court’s most immediately lethal decision remains Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. But do not let Dobbs distract from the onslaught that followed it. If anyone still doubted that the Supreme Court served as the nation’s chief policymaking institution after Dobbs, Thursday should put that to rest. The court is ruthlessly efficient, putting our gridlocked Congress to shame with its speedy and definitive resolution of the most pressing issues facing the country today. It does not require hourslong hearings or endless negotiations to operate. The six-justice conservative majority chooses which conflicts to prioritize, takes up cases that present them, then picks a winner, nearly always for the benefit of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
Consider the issues that SCOTUS has resolved this term—the first full term with a 6–3 conservative supermajority. The constitutional right to abortion: gone. States’ ability to limit guns in public: gone. Tribal sovereignty against state intrusion: gone. Effective constraints around separation of church and state: gone. The bar on prayer in public schools: gone. Effective enforcement of Miranda warnings: gone. The ability to sue violent border agents: gone. The Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases at power plants: gone. Vast areas of the law, established over the course of decades, washed away by a court over a few months.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/climate-change-epa-supreme-court-revolution.html
A friend of my granddaughter asked the other day just how it came to this…..40 years of dark money is the best answer.
Over the past several decades, corporate lawyers, right-wing activists, Republican officials, and dark money groups with deep pockets have been laying the groundwork for a far-reaching legal assault on the federal government’s ability to regulate U.S. industry—including the oil and gas sector threatening the planet.
On Thursday, their investments bore major fruit.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, a Supreme Court packed with right-wing judges handpicked and boosted by some of the same forces leading the yearslong crusade against the power of regulatory agencies—which conservatives often dub the “administrative state”—dramatically restricted the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to rein in greenhouse gas pollution from power plants.
All this abuses are standard fare these days….history is being crapped on by the very people that are suppose to guard our rights……
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is the most reactionary ever in American history. Its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision taking away abortion rights from American women is the first time the Court has ever overturned a constitutional precedent to take away rights. But let us not forget that this Court has also killed the Voting Rights Act by declaring most of it unconstitutional in Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. It has also killed union rights and unleashed corporate political money in Citizens United. And it has consistently chipped away at the separation of Church and State as evidenced in the recent Carson v. Makin. For a Chief Justice so worried about his legacy and the reputation of the Court, history will not be kind to him.
Ironically, history is central to the Roberts Court assault on rights. Better yet it is the abuse of history in its method of legal analysis and reasoning.
Starting back with Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese conservative jurists, including Justice Antonin Scalia and the members of the Federalist Society, argued that the Constitution should be interpreted in light of the intent of the framers. Such an approach, asking us what a bunch of slaveholders, bankers, and land speculators who were White and Christian thought about the rights of average people such as women, the poor, and people of color most certainly would doom their rights. That is why Justices such as Earl Warren, William Brennan, and others argued that rights need to be looked at in terms of the evolving standards of decency that mark the maturing of society. We need to read our Constitution with an evolving political morality that reflects political sensibilities reflective of today, not fixed in stone in 1787.
The Supreme Court and the Abuse of History: Rights Will Always Lose
Thanx to radical right wingers like the Federalist Society have worked for decades to undermine the Constitution….basically it is a power grab by the Neo-fascists of this country….and they are succeeding….
As the republic is dying and the people that pretend to love this country are by-standers….unless that changes all is lost.
There are ways to fight back…..impeachment (the magical word)……
There is a movement afoot to impeach Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Per Newsweek, the petition on MoveOn.org was created earlier this year after revelations that Thomas’ wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, pressured lawmakers and White House aides to overturn the 2020 election results. Meanwhile, Justice Thomas was the lone dissenting vote early this year when the Supreme Court rejected former President Trump’s attempt to withhold presidential records from Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigators. “Thomas’ failure to recuse himself warrants immediate investigation and heightened alarm,” the petition states, “and it’s only the latest in a long history of conflicts of interest … and mixing his powerful role with his conservative political activism.”
The petition was appended and gained considerable attention after the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning Roe v. Wade. In denouncing Thomas and the majority for overturning 50 years of precedent, the petition adds that—in the same ruling—the justice suggested reconsidering decisions that established the right to contraception and same-sex marriage, according to the Hill, which notes that Democratic Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes also called for impeaching other justices for misleading testimony during their Senate confirmation hearings. “If we allow Supreme Court nominees to lie under oath … and then issue—without basis, if you read these opinions—rulings that deeply undermine the human civil rights of the majority of Americans, we must see [impeachment] through,” Ocasio-Cortes said on Meet the Press.
According to Salon, Ocasio-Cortes also raised Justice Thomas’ past failure to disclose nearly $700,000 in income his wife took from the conservative Heritage Foundation. “I believe that violating federal law in not disclosing income from political organizations, as Clarence Thomas did years ago, is … potentially an impeachable offense,” Ocasio-Cortes said. Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar backed up her colleague in a tweet, saying, “We need an impeachment investigation into Clarence Thomas’s role in the January 6th coup, as well as into Gorsuch, Alito, Barrett, and Kavanaugh’s testimony on Roe during their confirmation hearings.”
This will probably go nowhere….but at least it is a start.
Enough Said!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 