Category Archives: Law and Justice

Rare show of bipartisanship

Certain things are known as the third rail in American politics.  The train runs on two tracks, the third rail provides the massive amount of electricity that powers the train.   If you touch the third rail, you die a horrible death by electrocution.   If you touch a third rail in American politics, like the scope of the comma sprinkled Second Amendment, which reads:  A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,  you risk causing violence.  

A riot, Martin Luther King Jr. observed, is the despairing voice of those who have no other voice to express their anger and desperation.  Such was the swarming of the Capitol building on January 6, at the moment Trump’s electoral loss was about to become official.  The rioters, and Trumpie himself, had no other voice at that moment but violence.   Imagine if the gun absolutists had their way, and the insane fuckers who stormed the People’s House in support of an unhinged, endlessly repeated lie had been legally allowed to carry, under a federal right to carry law, as much military-grade fire power as they claim the Constitution allows.   A bloodbath hardly imaginable in the most over-the-top Hollywood terrorist shoot ’em up, an actual violent revolution with shootings, hangings, perhaps even beheadings.  Having superior fire power in a fight turned violent literally means you get to call the shots. 

Can’t touch guns, reactionary genius Antonin Scalia said the Second Amendment confers an enumerated right to arm yourself with any sort of gun you want, as long as you are of legal age.   Guns are a third rail of American politics and an unimaginably gigantic mountain of money has been spent to make sure this false, violent, ugly controversy rages hot as the fires of hell in an impassioned televangelist’s sermon. 

On one side of the raging debate are gun manufacturers and people who own literally hundreds of millions of firearms.  There are more legally owned guns in the USA than there are citizens.   On the other side are people who believe gun ownership should be carefully regulated to cut down on America’s ever worsening mass killing sprees by enraged, murderous idiots the media insists on calling “gunmen”.  Imagine who wins the gun debate in a state like Michigan where protesters can lawfully bring their guns right into the hall where it’s being debated.

So, an eighteen year old asshole with a perfectly legal gun can drive miles to his selected target and spray bullets into people he hates, in this case Black people who he fervently believes are trying to replace the white race, whatever the fuck the white race is supposed to be.  People who look like this self-righteous young mass murderer, I suppose.   Nothing Congress can do about it, the Second Amendment, we are told, could not be more sacrosanct if Jesus Himself had written it with His own hand.

On the other hand, we had a moment of rare bipartisanship in the Senate earlier this month.   A draft of an incendiary Alito opinion, citing thirteenth and seventeenth century theologians and jurists to support his majority opinion that since many religious Christians believe abortion at any stage is murder (probably as many as believe Trump had his landslide victory stolen from him) the super-precedent of Roe v. Wade, conferring a constitutional right to bodily autonomy on pregnant women, must be overturned.   If any draft opinion was written to provoke outrage, it was Alito’s.  It is the seemingly polite, quietly seething ones you have to watch out for, they’re the most dangerously provocatively enemies.

After the leak, most likely by a right wing activist trying to ensure there’d be no backing down from Alito’s extreme view about the Supreme Court’s right to take away “unenumerated rights” not originally specified in 1789, there were protests outside the homes of several justices in the majority.  They were peaceful protests, angry people with signs.  Outside of Kavanaugh’s house neighbors served the protesters wine and cheese, we are told (and, in fairness to those neighbors, would you want to live next door to that pugnacious, self-righteous, reactionary piece of shit?).   

The Senate immediately leaped into action with a law to protect Supreme Court justices from this outrage.  They can’t make a carve out to the filibuster to protect the right to vote, can’t curb police violence against unarmed, disproportionately “nonwhite” citizens, can’t stop fighting about citizens’ right to health care, or a living federal minimum wage, but they leap, quickly and unanimously,  to protect the most privileged nine judges in the United States of America from peaceful protesters exercising a fundamental right enumerated in the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights.   Here’s Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal with the story:

Senate passes bill to protect supreme court justices families

Here’s Jamelle Bouie writing in the New York Times with a more nuanced treatment of the same story:

The Push to Silence Protesters Over the Roe Decision

Glenn Kirschner with a welcome take on justice

Glenn Kirschner lays out the legal dilemma that members of Congress who have refused to give truthful testimony about January 6th to the January 6th House Select Committee will face if they go to the Don McGahn/ John Bolton/Mark Meadows route to conceal evidence to obstruct justice and avoid incriminating a criminal former president and his criminal associates.

Here is a brilliant idea from a comment on Glenn Kirschner’s video, it would sweep several vocal obstructionists out of Congress if they refuse to testify and it would end the Trumpian immunity they transactionally claim to defy Congressional subpoenas.

Supporting segregation makes you look racist, banning abortion is a moral, conservative Christian duty

Mehdi Hasan lays out the grim history of how determined, organized American reactionaries, realizing segregation was a bad look in the Civil Rights era, galvanized Evangelical Christians behind the religious Catholic doctrine that a fetus, even a one minute old zygote, is a fully formed human life and made opposition to abortion the unifying principle of the extreme right.

Nothing racist about forcing women, even if they’re poor and Black, to carry even a rapist’s seed to term. It’s God’s will, motherfuckers, ask Jesus!

The Scheme to capture the federal courts, part 14

The fourteenth installment of Sheldon Whitehouse’s excellent The Scheme series, outlining very clearly how far right extremists have captured the federal judiciary for preordained political ends, funded with unlimited dark money from undisclosed extremely wealthy reactionaries intent on preserving their privileges at all costs. 

The only shame is that this chillingly true presentation was not made, and widely disseminated, ten years ago, in time for voters and legislators to stop the infernal machinations of dark money funded reactionary zealots, before these fiendishly determined motherfuckers won their long war to turn back the clock and protect their own rights at the expense of everyone else’s.  

Joe Manchin casts vote to sink legislating Roe, along with all 50 MAGA senators

John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was an American statesman and political theorist from South Carolina who held many important positions including being the seventh vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832, while adamantly defending slavery and protecting the interests of the white South. He began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent of a strong national government and protective tariffs. In the late 1820s, his views changed radically, and he became a leading proponent of states’ rights, limited government, nullification, and opposition to high tariffs. He saw Northern acceptance of those policies as a condition of the South remaining in the Union. His beliefs and warnings heavily influenced the South’s secession from the Union in 1860–1861

Remind you of anyone?

In the late 1820s, his views changed radically, and he became a leading proponent of states’ rights, limited government, nullification, and opposition to high tariffs.

The John Birch Society is the current GOP

The John Birch Society was, at the time of its creation in 1958, the lunatic fringe of the far right. Formed by several wealthy right wing businessmen in a rage against the “activist” Supreme Court that unanimously declared segregation of public schools unconstitutional, Birchers believed this communist judicial activism was leading us down a slippery slope toward “forced integration”, integrated labor unions, full rights for women and other abominations of majoritarian tyranny. Movement conservatives steered clear of these rich extremists who saw commies everywhere, pulling the strings, making intolerable outcomes happen — like forcing whites who honestly hated Blacks to send their children to school with… you know. The lunatics who started this paranoiac right-wing interest group (which is still alive today, google these insane funsters) included wealthy fossil fuel baron Fred Koch, admirer of Mr. Hitler and father of American far-right titan and architect of the modern Republican party, Charles Koch. They’ve come a long way since 1958, taking over the Republican party with the vitality of their big ideas, as Heather Cox Richardson explains:

In Michigan, Republican Ryan Kelley, who is running for governor, has openly attacked the idea of democracy. “Socialism—it starts with democracy,” he said. “That’s the ticket for the left. They want to push this idea of democracy, which turns into socialism, which turns into communism in every instance.” Kelley’s distinction between “democracy” and a “constitutional republic” is drawn from the John Birch Society in the 1960s, which used that distinction to oppose the idea of one person, one vote, that supported Black voting.

In turn, the Birchers drew from the arguments of white supremacists during Reconstruction after the Civil War, who warned that Black voters would elect leaders who promised them roads, and schools, and hospitals. These benefits would cost tax dollars that in the postwar South would have to be paid largely by white landowners. Thus, white voters insisted, Black voting would lead to a redistribution of wealth; by 1871, they insisted it was essentially “socialism.”

source

Democracy, a dirty, slippery slope down to providing equal rights and equal protection of the law to everyone. Where does this decadent slide toward socialism end? Socialized medicine, a so-called right to affordable health care in the richest nation in human history? Making billionaires, who made two trillion in pocket change during the pandemic, pay more than 8% tax on that money? Jesus, socialism is un-American, as anti-American as anti-fascism and the millions of unhinged “woke” maniacs protesting when one black guy, with a criminal record, no less, gets accidentally killed by four cops. God save our flawed vessel king! Who are you gullible dummies going to believe, the fake news or Jesus Christ Himself?