The far right Supreme Court: As if we don't have enough to worry about
By Hal Brown
Unrelated stories that piqued my interest will be at the bottom of this page. Special bonus on bottom of page, an exclusive photo essay you won't see anywhere else.
There have been several articles in the past few days that reminded me that between all the things happening to the country from turning us into a fascist far-right dominated banana republic, the Supreme Court is will begin its next session next on Monday week.
Here's are the cases likely to be ruled on:
Here are a few more stories, with more to follow if they are published through the day. Let's start with The Nation since they have the best illustration:
The Supreme Court Returns on Monday, Stronger and More Terrible Than Ever by Elie Mystal
This term, the high court will cement its grip on political life in America, overturning affirmative action and other critical protections along the way.
While we don’t yet know what election-specific cases will make their way to the Supreme Court, it may be that the court itself doesn’t have to dirty its hands by ending democratic self-government this term the way it ended equality for women last term. The court could just let Republican-controlled state legislatures do it themselves. The most important case on the upcoming docket is one that tests the “independent state legislature” theory, which is a fancy way of saying that state legislatures, not the voters, get to choose the state’s representatives in Congress.
I can’t predict how the court will assert its political dominance over our country, but what I do know is that it will continue to wage war on the forces of tolerance and fairness. This term will see the end of affirmative action, a particularly bitter pill given that it will be the first term for Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice. This term will also see renewed attacks on LGBTQ rights, tribal sovereignty, and, of course, any programs to address climate change or the destruction of the environment.
This isn’t how things are supposed to work in a constitutional republic. The people are supposed to elect representatives, and those representatives are supposed to pass laws within constitutional bounds as interpreted by impartial arbiters. If the arbiters are not impartial, they should be able to be recalled, and if the representatives don’t do what the people want, they should be able to be fired. That would be healthy. That would be self-government.
While there are high profile case you have heard of, there are others your probably haven't been aware of, for example:
NATIONAL PORK PRODUCERS COUNCIL V. ROSS
DATE OF HEARING: OCTOBER 11
First and foremost, this case is about the pork industry’s cruelty to animals for no reason other than to maximize profits. There are important and nuanced legal issues here, but we can’t lose sight of the literal animal torture at the heart of this case.
The pork industry uses something called “gestation crates” to confine pregnant pigs. These contraptions are actually 2-by-7-foot metal cages that aren’t big enough to allow the 400-to-500-pound animal to move or turn around. The sows are kept in the cages until they give birth; the piglets are taken and, when they get to be five or six months old, killed; and then the sows are reimpregnated and the torturous process resumes.
Then there's this guest opinion essay from The New York Times:
The author, Jeff Shesol begins:
In a recent speech at Independence Hall, President Biden called on Americans to stand against an assault on democracy — the ongoing assault waged by insurrectionists and would-be patriots, by election deniers and other extremists. “We are not powerless in the face of these threats,” he insisted. “We are not bystanders.”
Yet that role — bystander — is exactly the one Mr. Biden seems to have assigned himself when it comes to the Supreme Court, which is posing a more profound challenge to the American system of self-government than any violent mob has managed. The court’s conservative justices have issued a run of rulings that make it harder for many Americans, particularly citizens of color, to vote; make it easier for partisans to grab power by distorting the shape of legislative districts; and make it nearly impossible to counter the corrupting influence of money in politics. This is only a partial list — and is, most likely, only the beginning. In the term that starts on Oct. 3, the conservative bloc, six justices strong and feeling its oats, will decide whether anAlabama congressional map discriminates against Black voters and will consider a novel theory that state legislatures should have a free hand, unconstrained by state courts, in setting rules for federal elections.
He goes on:
In Philadelphia and on the hustings, Mr. Biden has begun to acknowledge the tribal warfare that consumes this country. Yet the Roberts court is both a product and a sponsor of that conflict, and the president should say so. He needs to “take the country to school,” as Felix Frankfurter, who would later become a Supreme Court justice himself, urged Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, when another ideologically driven court had put democracy on the docket.
Down the page we have this illustration. I enlarged a portion so you can see who is depicted.
The conclusion:
“No matter how long the road,” Mr. Biden promised in Philadelphia, “progress does come.” Yet it will not come unless every American of conscience — including the one in the White House — steps off the sidelines. Until then, the assault on democracy he described will continue. It will be waged in state legislatures and in Congress, and on the first Monday of October it will recommence in the conference room of the Supreme Court.
Here's one from the (subscription) Washington Post by Ruth Marcus:
Marcus begins:
The cataclysmic Supreme Court term that included the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion and the end of constitutional protection for abortion would, in the normal ebb and flow, be followed by a period of quiet, to let internal wounds heal and public opinion settle.
That doesn’t appear likely in the term set to start Monday. Nothing in the behavior of the court’s emboldened majority suggests any inclination to pull back on the throttle. The Supreme Court is master of its docket, which means that it controls what cases it will hear, subject to the agreement of four justices. Already, with its calendar only partly filled, the justices have once again piled onto their agenda cases that embroil the court in some of the most inflammatory issues confronting the nation — and more are on the way.
Last term, in addition to overruling Roe v. Wade, the conservative majority expanded gun rights, imposed severe new constraints on the power of regulatory agencies and further dismantled the wall of separation between church and state.
She concludes:
“When the court gets involved in things that it doesn’t have to, especially if those things are very contested in the society, it just looks like it’s just spoiling for trouble,” Kagan said in an appearance at Northwestern Law School. “That makes people, again, rightly suspicious that the court is doing something not particularly court-like and law-like.”
Which brings me back to Baude’s* description of this majority: fearless. I would choose a different word: heedless. Heedless of any constraints on its power or the effects on the judiciary. Heedless of the real-world consequences of its actions — on women, on minorities, on public safety and, most worrisome, on democracy itself.
As October Term 2022 gets underway, I search in vain for signs of this heedlessness abating. Seeing few, I worry, for the court and for the country whose future it will shape.
She concludes:
“When the court gets involved in things that it doesn’t have to, especially if those things are very contested in the society, it just looks like it’s just spoiling for trouble,” Kagan said in an appearance at Northwestern Law School. “That makes people, again, rightly suspicious that the court is doing something not particularly court-like and law-like.”
Which brings me back to Baude’s* description of this majority: fearless. I would choose a different word: heedless. Heedless of any constraints on its power or the effects on the judiciary. Heedless of the real-world consequences of its actions — on women, on minorities, on public safety and, most worrisome, on democracy itself.
As October Term 2022 gets underway, I search in vain for signs of this heedlessness abating. Seeing few, I worry, for the court and for the country whose future it will shape.
* University of Chicago law professor William Baude
File the next two stories under from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The sublime:
The ridiculous:
And then of course there's Ginni Thomas who is making the news all over the place because she testified before the Jan. 6th Committee yesterdays. Gene Robinson on Morning Joe called her demented.
In the documentary "Created Equal," Thomas recalled that Biden had questioned him about the role of Natural Law in his interpretation of the Constitution. Thomas claimed later that he had no idea what Biden was talking about, but sat there pretending to listen because he had to. According to Reason, Thomas had allegedly endorsed two contradictory views on judicial activism in relation to the Constitution. As it turned out, Biden had omitted Thomas' explanation that only endorsed one view — the one that condemned judicial activism.
This small incident, however, was dwarfed by charges toward the end of the hearings. A colleague named Anita Hill (via PBS NewsHour) accused Thomas of making graphic and sexually inappropriate remarks to her. He denied all accusations, calling the incident a "high-tech lynching" targeted against him because he was an independently-minded Black man. Anita Hill, meanwhile, has become a Brandeis professor and per ABC, has stood by her claims, referring to herself as a "crusader" for the victims of sexual harassment and assault. Biden later apologized to Anita Hill for "the treatment she received" from the Senate, but she did not accept the apology.
It is being reported that
Ginni Thomas denied discussing election subversion efforts with her husband.
We don't know whether or not she is lying. It is difficult to believe hubby didn't know wifey's views on this.
We don't now whether or not Clarence shared Ginni's view that Biden stole the election from Trump through some kind of nefarious, highly complex, and ultimately successful scheme, and if he did whether this effected his refusing to recuse himself from any matters involving the Jan. 6th resurrection. We know that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Justice Clarence Thomas to resign because he refused to do this.
News that piqued my interest
The New York Times reported:
As a freshman congressman in 2013, Ron DeSantis was unambiguous: A federal bailout for the New York region after Hurricane Sandy was an irresponsible boondoggle, a symbol of the “put it on the credit card mentality” he had come to Washington to oppose. “I sympathize with the victims,” he said. But his answer was no.
As the Times’ report noted, the far-right Floridian is now offering the public “tonal whiplash,” insisting that the kind of disaster aid he used to vote against is the same kind of disaster aid the people of Florida now need. Reference
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| I resisted adding any of Stormy Daniel's observations about Trump's body parts. |
But perhaps the most revealing aspect of the book, to be published next week, is that Trump gave Maggie, a Times reporter since 2015, three interviews for it. This is the same Trump who vilified her on Twitter, called her names and cast her as the personification of “fake news.” Maggie just pressed on, asking the right questions, getting the right people to answer them and seemingly trusting on some level that Trump would never wholly cut her off. She can recognize a performance when she sees one. And she can hear in a narcissist’s self-regarding soliloquies the aching need to babble on.
Their relationship says so much about Trump — some of it long obvious, some of it less so. It proves his awareness of the lies he tells: If he really believed, as he publicly claimed, that Maggie was a fabulist, he’d deem it pointless and potentially ruinous to talk with her. He’d stop. But he clearly respected her, even as he trashed her, the ugly act of which confirms the void where a moral person’s conscience resides.
He’ll do anything to survive. And he’ll do anything for an audience. Maggie (a friend of mine) and the other journalists whom he publicly insulted but privately indulged were, to him, reserves of precious attention, their discerning gazes trained on him, their busy thoughts dedicated to the puzzle of him, their notepads and audio recordings and television cameras a conduit to ever greater fame. There was danger in letting them in, peril in having them around, but the alternative was worse. They might give prime real estate on the evening’s newscast to some other circus act. They might write books about a lesser clown.
Conclusion:
But it does at least suggest the kind of discipline that Trump lacks. It also demonstrates that Biden’s vanity, unlike Trump’s, has limits.
To Trump, all of us in the news business and all of the people at his rallies are mirrors, assembled into a fun house where every room, every wall, every corner shows him the visage that he relishes more than any other: his own.
Are you suggesting that Donald Trump didn't bring home 11,000 documents to Mar-a-Lago because he wanted to read them? That's not why he had those documents there?
This shows you how bad I am at predicting events. I never thought that, of all the things Donald Trump would steal from the White House, reading material would be among them. Never. I mean, silverware, yes. Maybe some extra bottles of ketchup, I don't know. Reading material, never in a million years.
We've always had dumb politicians, but in the last 50 years, ignorance has really reached critical mass.
They were begging him to read stuff when he was there. One trick they used with Donald Trump, and this isn't made up — nothing in the book is made up — but one trick that the National Security Council would use, whenever they had a really important memo they wanted him to read, they would put the word "Trump" in as many paragraphs as possible, hoping that would catch his eye. He really likes that word. I don't think it succeeded, but it was worth a try.
Finally, you get to the celebration phase, and this is something. The celebration of idiocy and how dangerous it is. Donald Trump ushered in that celebration.
Donald Trump actually doesn't have to make much of an effort. He is one of the most deeply ignorant presidents, probably the most ignorant, in our history. On the internet, especially on Twitter, it's so easy to call somebody an idiot or a moron. I'm sure you and I have been called that many, many times — today already. But I really prefer the term "ignoramus" because ignoramus literally means somebody who doesn't know things. And Donald Trump does not know any school subject well, even the areas of his so-called expertise, like business and construction and renovation. He doesn't know about that either. I have a lot of quotes from people who worked for him who said he was completely at sea when it came to that stuff.
But what's really horrifying about this stage — there are two kinds of ignorant politicians we're dealing with now. We have Marjorie Taylor Greene, who comes by ignorance very naturally. I mean, she's the one who says that I personally have a space laser — which I wish I had! I wish I could operate a space laser. That is such a flattering assessment of me, to think that I could operate such machinery. I barely can get on Zoom, and she thinks I can do a space laser. So she comes by it naturally. Lauren Boebert comes by it very naturally. Louie Gohmert, people like that.
But then there are these super-educated guys like Ted Cruz, Princeton grad, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley. These guys know better, and yet they're making really dumb decisions because it appeals to this populist sense that we don't want smart people running the show. To me, the celebration phase is the most heinous phase, because we have people who really know better who are acting like dopes, and it's hurting us. It's endangering us.
Here's a story I guarantee you won't see anywhere else:
I was headed to our local big grocery store, Fred Meyers to buy some organic vegetables, and saw a big pick-up truck flying a large American flag and a Don't Tread on Me flag from the back. I didn't have time to take a photo but then thought while this is not typical in our liberal community it isn't rare. I thought no big deal.
In particular I wanted to buy some Russet baking potatoes and was disappointed to see that there weren't any in the loose potatoes bin. I asked a clerk it hey had any in the back because on another occasion they did.
Another customer overheard me and showed me that on the other side of the aisle there had lots of bagged Russets.
Not really.
Here's the friendly man who told me about the potatoes:
Hmm, I thought, this must be a super-patriotic MAGA-man. Then he turned around it is was even worse.
He was wearing an Alex Jones InfoWars t-shirt.
Alex Jones has been in the news lately (read stories) over his loss in the Sandy Hook parents lawsuit leading to his having to declare bankruptcy, and his maniacal rants about what he considers an outrage.
I tried to find the exact version he was wearing online but couldn't. Here are some others from ETSY:
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