The Supreme Court is ruined. It no longer has any credibility. The fault lies with Republicans, but it also lies with the Democrats. The Republican Party has had strategies in place to push Democrats out of power, although Dems represent a majority of American voters. Republicans have been pursuing their plan for at least a decade and it can probably be traced all the way back to the Reagan administration or perhaps even Nixon. They found a rabid voter base by turning to Evangelicals and Catholics and by arguing that America was in decline because they no longer went to church or practiced Christian morality. They set themselves up to be America’s moral authority with no more qualifications for that job than any other political party and by a decidedly unconstitutional denial of the separation of church and state that was important to our founders. Originalists indeed, but only when it suits their purposes. Republicans used the issues of abortion rights and women’s rights and voting rights to gin up divisions which have been exacerbated by a changing economy and a cult of personality.
Democrats must have understood what Republicans were up to, but they decided to be the party of reason, to stick to the pathways of regular order and to try to govern without Republicans while facing the headwinds of a party in revolt against Democrats. The Republicans have tarnished Democrats (and even the word democracy) by sliming all over the word liberal, by demonizing the left and by painting the left as more extreme than their behavior warranted.
Democrats should have been angrier, less willing to overlook things like the disrespectful behavior of The Freedom Caucus, and the dramatic rhetoric of a mad President. We should have mobilized and fought the good fight with every political strategy ever devised. But we watched. We watched as our agencies and government experts were sent packing, as our government was hollowed out. We watched Mitch McConnell deny Obama the right to appoint a Justice to the Supreme Court. We watched Trump fill three Supreme Court seats from a list provided by the Federalist Society, Originalists all.
From a Google Image Search - Constitutional Accountability Center
Originalists pretend that they channel our founders, that they have studied the original intent of our documents and that they want to go back to 1789 and take the path that was not taken, the path favored by Southern plantation owners and elites, the path that gives power back to individual states. States rights was put forward by southerners to hold on to slavery. Any states rights movement is tied into racism because of its connections to slavery. If the United States becomes a loose affiliation of states without a strong central government, the center will not hold. Chaos will ensue and laws will change with each state border.
The draft decision exposed in Politico of the Supreme Court re Roe v Wade contains such a flawed argument that it is not worth the paper it is written on. Alito argues that abortion has no deep roots or tradition in our Constitution. This is an Originalist argument. Women have no deep roots or tradition in our Constitution. Women are not mentioned by our documents until they win the vote in 1920. You cannot use an Originalist argument here. Women may have been lumped in with men, or when the word ‘people,’ as in ‘we the people’ was used but that was not intended to ascribe any enumerated rights to women. Considering the role of women in the 18 th century, it could be argued that women were not specifically mentioned because they had no rights of their own.
From a Google image Search - The Nation
We watched these future justices lie at their confirmation hearings. We suspected that they had been read their lines by the Federalist Society since they all used the same answers and then we politely confirmed them anyway. Democrats did not want Kavanaugh on the court. We certainly did not want Amy Coney Barrett, but somehow, we never have the votes in Congress to win the day. And that has also been engineered by a very wily Republican Party through constant attacks on voting that have given their base a power that defies demographics.
The day the pre-clearance section of the voting rights act was overturned by the Supreme Court was the very day that the demise of Roe v Wade became an almost certain reality. The Supreme Court is a body apart from government, but we know that when a leader wants to take over control of a nation one of the first steps is to nullify the courts, to turn the courts into a political rubber stamp.
This is bad. This is very bad. We have lost almost all the guardrails of our democracy. If Trump (or a ‘Trumpy’ leader) wins in 2024 our democracy may be considered dead also. Women’s rights are human rights. Taking away rights with a valid argument is one thing; taking away rights with a flawed argument is quite another. This decision should not stand. The Supreme Court is not supposed to be a partisan body and it should absolutely consider the voices of American citizens. These are justices, not Gods.
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