Glenn Kirschner describes what ought to be done, in a functioning democracy, when candidates for lifetime appointments on the nation’s highest, unappealable court lie during their confirmation hearings about what is settled law and what is “egregiously bad settled law”.
If those who technically control Congress only had a collective spine…
You recall, of course, the boss’s pithy comments about the same Democratic representative from California, right before his first impeachment.
The painting of targets begins.
Here’s a great piece from Dana Milbank in today’s Washington Bezos, called “Supreme Court’s hacks reward Republicans’ betrayal of democracy.”
Worse, this McConnell-packed Roberts court has returned the favor by stacking the deck in favor of minority rule by Republicans. It has blessed partisan gerrymandering, giving Republicans representation in the House disproportionate to their share of the electorate. It has allowed elections to be decided by billionaires and corporations spending unlimited sums of untraceable money. It has kneecapped labor unions, co-signed voter-suppression schemes by Republican-run states and eviscerated the civil rights era Voting Rights Act, to disastrous effect for Black and brown voters.
Now comes this breathtaking assault on the rights of women, a strongly Democratic constituency, eliminating the right tens of millions have firmly relied upon for half a century to control their own bodies.
The five justices have aligned themselves with the 16 percent of Americans who, according to the latest Post-ABC News poll believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and against the 79 percent who believe it should be legal in at least some circumstances. Eighty-two percent of Americans believe abortion should be allowed if a woman’s life is endangered, 79 percent in cases of rape or incest and 67 percent if the child would be born with a life-threatening illness.
Not to mention, of course, that this pandemic induced inflation is global. From Robert Reich
“Deeply rooted in this country’s history and traditions” is the standard seething reactionary Samuel Alito sets for what is permissible when the Supreme Court enumerates an unenumerated constitutional right of citizenship. Like a citizen’s unenumerated right not to be forcibly sterilized, for example, enumerated in 1942 by the Supreme Court.
He gets legal support for the argument that abortion was always illegal in this country, and thus deeply rooted, from an English aristocrat, the guy who codified procedures for witch trials in the 17th century, making it easier to execute the female minions of Satan. He cites this English Lord, Sir Matthew Hale, over and over as an unimpeachable legal authority on abortion, unimpeachable as the twice impeached Putin ally who appointed a supermajority from Alito’s judicial fraternity to decide what is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of this country (lynchings and pogroms are two that spring to mind). Hale denounced the Satanic evils of abortion in the 1640s, which is more than good enough legal authority for the Federalist Society Six.
Here’s an excellent discussion of the drive to “repeal the twentieth century” now in full, ugly swing, as a mob of top GOP officials calls for the blood of a partisan leaker of unknown allegiance, for, as many have noted, violating the sacred privacy of the Supreme Court. Talk about your fucking unenumerated rights…
Samuel Alito, joined by four fellow extremists from the Federalist Society, states in his draft opinion that abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution, and therefore, under Originalism, may not be added as an unenumerated privacy right by activist federal judges flexing their judicial muscle, beyond appeal, beyond ethics.
Note that slavery is not mentioned in the Constitution either, except obliquely as “such persons as the states shall see fit to admit” and “three fifths of all other persons”. Nonetheless slavery was vigorously enforced at law under perfectly constitutional federal statutes like the Fugitive Slave Acts and all that followed, up to the present day.
Alito’s probably not too happy about the outcome of the Civil War and all those messy amendments giving rights to people who never had them and more powers to the federal union than the Founding Fathers, in their almost divine wisdom, provided for. His ilk believe that all unenumerated rights, like the right to vote in federal elections, are best left up to the independent state legislatures, under the poison pill doctrine set out as dicta in Bush v. Gore…
Nothing activist about these five activist fucks, though. Ask Ginni Thomas.
The right not to undergo forced sterilization, we learn from Alito’s draft, was not recognized as a constitutional right until 1942, though it is an unenumerated right seemingly so fundamental that one would not think it needed to be enumerated. Alito focused on constitutional rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and traditions” such as, one imagines, the presumption that police killing of unarmed citizens is justified, unless that citizen is wealthy, and white, or that the Second Amendment may not be seen as a license to regulate a “well-regulated militia”, or five unelected lifetime appointees, from the same activist judicial fraternity, overruling (by a single vote) enforcement of a law protecting the right to vote that passed the Senate 98-0, because, you know, such things are deeply rooted in this nation’s history and traditions.
It’s the quietly seething motherfuckers, like Alito, Gorsuch and the Black Klansman, that you have to watch out for. Meanwhile, the party of the five unappealable justices calls for a swift investigation of, and harsh punishment for, whatever unprincipled traitor leaked this secret document. As they obstruct “partisan” “illegitimate” investigation of a riot that stopped all business at the Capitol related to the peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of our democracy, because, you know — mobs of angry Blacks and women! Tax and spend! Queers! Commies!
Enough to make you angry enough to vote? Come on, now.
Every child believes deeply in fairness, until the world teaches it otherwise, the kid begins picking a side in every fight and fairness becomes secondary to her team prevailing. Unfairness is universally painful, being treated unfairly hurts everybody it happens to. We all like to think we’re fair, it is a synonym for reasonable, but the fact is that adults can be fair or unfair, recognize the importance of rules to ensure fairness or defy any norm that allows any outcome they don’t want.
A reasonable person listens to a story with an open mind (to the extent possible) and assesses it as likely or unlikely based on experience and knowledge. The purely transactional listener evaluates a story based solely on how well it advances the interests he wants to advance. The mercenary listener is looking for an angle, a simple transaction, not complicated by the merits of the case, the evidence presented or that abstract quality of fairness, only how it increases advantage and enhances the desired bottom line. You have either a fairness based vision of justice, or a might makes right mentality.
You treat everyone as equal under the law or, under might makes right, you treat your friends as above the law, exempt from all legal coercion, and demand that anyone who opposes your desires be subject to the harshest of laws available (and not ruling out extra-judicial forms of discipline, which are always on the table). While you are in charge your friends and supporters don’t have to worry about any law that will stop them from acting on their strong feelings. As long as they are vocally loyal to you, you will protect them, until it is transactionally advantageous to cut them off. Because what the fuck is Fair anyway?
You can weigh the arguments on the actual facts of the case or you can weigh the arguments and frame them cleverly, to reach the desired outcome. The second way is the way of the zealot, the partisan, the political activist, the way of the Federalist Society.
The stench coming off the McConnell/Trump Supreme Court today is a reminder of how crucial nonpartisan elections are for democracy. How it is crucial to elect a few more Democratic senators, to prevent two from vetoing filibuster reform to get election and voting rights laws passed.
Norms, it turns out, don’t restrain zealots and extremists who believe only in power, and in using power to retain power (the updated definition of “conservative”). Laws can ensure a certain measure of justice, but only if they are always enforced. Selective enforcement, and the outcomes of court challenges often hinging on which party has more money to spend on an army of top lawyers, ensures rule by the most corrupt. Which, as any eight year-old will tell you, is completely unfair.
Here is a great primer on the once fringe economic and political theory called neoliberalism. It is a wild variation on the old laissez-faire philosophy of capitalism, based on the well-worn theory that the Invisible Hand of the Free Market is wiser, more fair and infinitely more flexible than any government regulation could ever be. Neoliberalism has done as much as any political force to bring the world to the brink of global authoritarianism. This podcast does a great job laying neoliberalism out clearly.
Throughline: Capitalism: What Makes Us Free? (2021) https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510333/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/throughline/2022/04/20220407_throughline_neoliberalism_with_ads_kd_040722.mp3?awCollectionId=510333&awEpisodeId=1091050251&orgId=1&topicId=1136&d=3038&p=510333&story=1091050251&t=podcast&e=1091050251&size=48612502&ft=pod&f=510333
When you feel helpless, are in need of the consoling connection to others that all living creatures require, a common response to this desperation is anger. You derive energy and a feeling of righteousness from galvanizing your hurt into rage. You can also turn anger on yourself, blaming yourself for feeling helpless, hopeless, weak, abandoned and so forth, but this self-directed rage inflicts even more damage than what has already been done to you. Turning the anger outward requires only a good story, a good enough story (it can actually be a completely incoherent story), to let you know who is to blame for the pain you are in. Once you can ascribe blame you’re on your way.
Today’s radical right wing has become expert in keeping the rage turned up all the time. You feel fucked? We’ll tell you why — it’s that senile puppet Joe Biden’s fucking fault, like it was Obama’s before him, and fucking Clinton’s before that. The only time you were watched over tenderly in recent memory, these extremists preach, was under Donald Trump and Dick Cheney. Radical antidemocratic oligarchs like Charles Koch have no hesitation to use any tactic that works to convince millions that large societal problems aren’t being solved, not because of the zero sum divisive political warfare he has been relentlessly waging for decades, and the lawmaking gridlock their obstructionist tactics have caused, no! — it’s the fault of the fucking communists who have taken over one of the major political parties in the country!
I suspect that every person susceptible to this “argument” — that everything was, more or less, perfect until these “woke” libtard cucks took over the party of our enemies and are constantly acting like “snowflake” victims, cynically exploiting “identity politics,” to win rigged elections that always favor majoritarian tyranny — has personal reason to be angry. Focusing the free floating personal anger and anxiety on enemies, who can be blamed, hated and, in a perfect world, publicly executed, is the genius of the radical right, has been all throughout history. It exploits the feeling of justice we have every time we put a bully on his ass.
On a personal level we can often see the roots of rage quite clearly. An abusive parent, insisting they never abused anyone. A rape that nobody in the legal system, unfortunately, is going to be able to do anything about. That one day hesitation to report the crime proved fatal to the legal case against the rapist fuck. Indigestible things happen to us sometimes, and those things are food for anger, which, like water, can take on any shape, fit any container perfectly, and is always flowing. The ratings king of rage, the guy with the puckered brow who just keeps asking innocently leading questions of his gigantic audience, Tucker Carlson, has only recently revealed the partial roots of his always boiling, though jovially presented, “just asking” anger.
For many years, Tucker Carlson was tight-lipped about the rupture [with his mother]. In a New Yorker profile in 2017, not long after his show debuted, he described his mother’s departure as a “totally bizarre situation — which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all.” But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson began to describe his early life in darker tones, painting the California of his youth as a countercultural dystopia and his mother as abusive and erratic.
In 2019, speaking on a podcast with the right-leaning comedian Adam Carolla, Mr. Carlson said his mother had forced drugs on her children. “She was like, doing real drugs around us when we were little, and getting us to do it, and just like being a nut case,” Mr. Carlson said. By his account, his mother made clear to her two young sons that she had little affection for them. “When you realize your own mother doesn’t like you, when she says that, it’s like, oh gosh,” he told Mr. Carolla, adding that he “felt all kinds of rage about it.”
All kinds of rage, you know. Many different forms of rage. Rage rages, it’s all it can do. It may rage quietly or loudly, but everything it does is in the service of keeping the righteous feeling of being totally fucking right pumping away. And, as everybody knows, there are few feelings to equal the satisfaction of knowing that you are totally fucking right and justified, in anything you do to bring justice to the vicious fucks you blame for hurting you.
gratuitousblahg 