Is SCOTUS The Final Word?

It is a common thought that all is lost when SCOTUS makes its decisions for they have the final word.

Is that necessarily true?

When the Supreme Court was holding oral arguments last December in the case that brought about the end of Roe v. Wade, Justice Sonia Sotomayor addressed the familiar argument that the Constitution doesn’t mention a right to privacy. That fact was a central argument in the court’s majority opinion issued last month, per NPR. But there’s a lot that’s not mentioned in the Constitution, the justice said. In fact, “there is not anything in the Constitution that says that the Court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means,” Sotomayor pointed out. “And yet, she added, “what the Court did was reason from the structure of the Constitution that that’s what was intended.”

The justice might have been mostly intending to say that rights, including the one to privacy, can exist without being clearly stated in the Constitution, but Joshua Zeitz writes in an opinion piece in Politico that the power of judicial review is in the same boat. “Both exist by strong implication,” he says. Mostly, the court claimed that right for itself. Some framers did expect the Supreme Court, as well as lower federal courts, to exercise a veto on constitutional grounds over congressional and state acts, Zeitz writes. “But they did not intend this power to be unchecked or unlimited,” he says.

The Constitution is all about checks and balances, and the other branches could move to limit the judiciary just as the courts limit the activities of the others. The Constitution didn’t even design the court system, it left it to the other branches. So they can take steps to restrict the court on certain issues, Zeitz points out. Congress could pass a law denying the court authority over a new voting rights act, for example. “Ultimately, it is the responsibility and prerogative of the executive and legislative branches to encourage greater restraint and humility on the part of the judiciary,” Zeitz writes.

You can read the full piece here.

I have my doubts about this pronouncement…..why?

The US Congress is a toothless tiger.  It is so wrapped up in the mundane crap trying to find a consensus (at least one party is)….nothing will be done for SCOTUS is about political agenda and not what is best for this nation.

And of course there are opinions on how to ‘fix’ the Supreme Court….here are a few (my thoughts later)…..

The Supreme Court’s just-concluded term was a bacchanalia of reactionary indulgence. Roe v. Wade is dead. Gun laws throughout the nation are now in peril. The Court is pummeling the wall separating church and state — and it isn’t afraid to tell easily disprovable falsehoods to achieve this goal. The Court’s GOP-appointed majority curtailed the EPA’s power to fight climate change, and gave themselves an open-ended veto power over any federal regulation.

It’s likely that the worst is yet to come. Three “shadow docket” decisions this past term suggest that the Court is about to slash safeguards against racial gerrymandering. Another case looming in the next term, involving North Carolina’s gerrymandered congressional maps, is likely to give Republican state legislatures the power to defy their state constitution when writing election laws. And that’s after the Court has spent the last decade dismantling the Voting Rights Act and stripping the federal courts of any authority to fight partisan gerrymanders.

The Court’s Republican majority isn’t simply handing down bold conservative policy decrees, it is undermining democracy itself.

But just because court reform isn’t currently politically viable doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering, especially if Democrats somehow manage to pick up larger majorities in a future Congress. There are several options to deal with an increasingly partisan Supreme Court. Here are 10 of them.

https://www.vox.com/23186373/supreme-court-packing-roe-wade-voting-rights-jurisdiction-stripping

My thoughts on these ‘solutions’…..

Court packing is not viable….not in this political climate.

The Supreme Court lottery….now I can get behind this ‘solution’….

The most talked about ‘solution’ is term limits….another one that I agree with….as long as the Congress limits are included.

Omnibus legislation to overrule the court decisions…..again a good idea but the political climate these days will prevent anything like this idea to see the light of day.

SCOTUS needs reforming and some ideas are good……but as long as the court is run by political hacks all we can do is wish and hope and witness the death of the republic.

Any ideas you would like to share?

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Stumbling Toward War

Do not be fooled!

The Dems are just as much  warmongers as the GOP!

I know I am a hard Leftists and yet I still read and write about thoughts coming from the Right….most times it is the American Conservative…..why?

They seem to be one of the few that sees the fruitlessness of war and try to point out the way out of the vicious cycle that the M-IC and its paid agents has kept this country in conflict since the end of WW2.

Biden has made his statement on Taiwan and the media is having a field day analyzing what he really meant…..I believe it was not a gaff…it was Biden reassuring his handlers that the money will continue to flow…..

The AC has made its thoughts known…..

So much for strategic ambiguity. Speaking at a news conference in Tokyo on Monday, President Joe Biden committed the United States to militarily defend Taiwan in response to a potential Chinese invasion. A reporter asked Biden, “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?” To which the president replied, flatly, “Yes.” The reporter followed up: “You are?” The president was adamant: “That’s the commitment we made.”

Pardon me if I sound unduly alarmed, but can we please not go down this road? For the love of God, can America avoid opening up a direct confrontation with the nuclear-armed People’s Republic while we are already engaged in an openly acknowledged proxy war with Russia, another nuclear power?

Biden’s words in Tokyo were so direct and unambiguous they left his aides in the room visibly surprised, according to the New York Times. And understandably so: The commander-in-chief erased what little remained of America’s longstanding policy of leaving it up to Beijing to decide whether it thinks Washington will come to Taiwan’s defense, the idea being that ambiguity and unpredictability can serve as deterrents. If the Chinese know that an attack will be met by a U.S. military response, the only question from their point of view becomes when best to mount it, given the political climate and balance of forces.

Biden’s “commitment,” moreover, would upend decades of American policy: Taiwan isn’t a treaty ally like, say, Japan or Poland, and hasn’t been seen as such by successive administrations. Under the Taiwan Relations Act, which has structured America’s ties to Taiwan since 1979, the U.S. government is obliged to help arm the Taiwanese, but not to directly defend the island.

Stumbling Toward War On Two Fronts

Then there is Henry Kissinger….someone that I have seldom agreed with has made a comment on the Ukraine situation…..

n Monday the CIA announced it had added two stars to its Memorial Wall for fallen officers. The memo is, appropriately for the shady world of intelligence, vague. Perhaps these quiet dead Americans were not killed in Ukraine; perhaps they did not even die recently. But one does wonder. 

In a surreal recent exchange, a colleague wondered how many American lives must be spent on top of the $54 billion in taxpayer money to scrape out a stalemate in East Ukraine. What is our interest there? As if summoned from my least charitable imaginings, an aging swamp creature appeared, indignant in response, to declare the American dead worth it, all the money worth it, to give Russia a defeat. It was, he said, like when we gave weapons to the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, never mind Osama Bin Laden’s second career. It was, he said, like WWII all over again; if you give a dictator a bit of land, like the mouse and the cookie, he’ll want more of it. 

Perhaps when the war party is sending its people they are not sending their best. I shouldn’t take stale arguments from a man clinging to Cold War glory days as the best case for further American involvement in Ukraine. But I might counter one Cold Warrior with another and suggest that Henry Kissinger’s recent comments at Davos be given due consideration. The former secretary of State said that Ukraine should be willing to concede territory in the east to Russia in pursuit of peace. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome,” Kissinger said, as reported in the Daily Telegraph. “Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.” 

Kissinger warned against the West being caught up in the “mood of the moment.” The mood of the moment is an acknowledged proxy war with Russia, one to which, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the Pentagon is eager to deploy U.S. special forces (let’s pretend they are not already on the ground “advising”). Is this a flex? A threat? Do they think the Kremlin doesn’t read the Journal

Not Another Cold War

You cannot depend on the MSM for accurate information….one must look beyond the PR agenda of corporate America…..

The U.S. news media’s treatment of the Ukraine issue has long been characterized by flagrant favoritism. Reports from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, and Freedom House showing that Ukraine’s actual conduct differed markedly from its carefully crafted image as a dedicated young democracy received little coverage in the mainstream press. That willingness to conceal Ukraine’s corruption and authoritarianism has grown even worse since the outbreak of war with Russia. Media coverage moved quickly from ignoring or minimizing inconvenient information about Kyiv’s political and economic system to channeling outright Ukrainian propaganda.

For example, multiple unfiltered stories from Ukrayinska Pravda and other Ukrainian news outlets have become a nearly daily feature on Yahoo’s news feed. Official statements and press releases from Ukraine’s government also appear on Yahoo and other outlets, frequently without an acknowledgment that the accuracy of those accounts could not be confirmed. Contents in the Washington Post and the New York Times, which set the agenda and tone throughout much of the US news media on any issue, similarly have conveyed a solidly pro-Ukraine perspective. Moreover, there are very few competing accounts in those outlets from Russian news sources or even from American analyses that challenge the dominant narrative.

The willingness of the US press to foster a favorable image of Ukraine knows few bounds. During the early weeks of the war, American news outlets even circulated the story about the “Ghost of Kyiv” – the fighter pilot who supposedly became an ace in a matter of days by shooting down numerous Russian warplanes. That account had all the earmarks of transparent propaganda, and the Ukrainian military ultimately conceded that the story was fictional. In the meantime, however, it had served its purpose well as propaganda for credulous Western audiences, and the US press aided that effort. Indeed, the coverage of Kyiv’s retraction of the story was noticeably limited.

The News Media’s Ukraine Whitewash Grows Worse

I wish people would stop accepting BS as fact…use your brain….once in awhile…..

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