gracchusdixit

If there were any lingering doubt that the conservative cabal that now holds the Supreme Court of the United States in its deadly grip is not the dispassionate arbiter of the constitution it pretends to be but, rather, a partisan instrument of the rabid political right, that doubt should forever be laid to rest.  In the final days of its most recent term, perhaps the most infamous in the history of the court, the cabal handed down a series of monumentally illogical and morally indefensible decisions, revealing their true colors and exposing their intellectual hypocrisy for all the world to see.

The first of those decisions overturned Roe v. Wade, which for half a century secured the right of women to make their own reproductive choices, albeit encumbered by a host of ludicrous limitations.  The main excuse served up for extinguishing this most basic and personal of rights, which condemns half the population of the nation to perpetual sexual servitude, was that the Constitution nowhere mentions abortion.  This lame excuse would be laughable if its consequences weren’t so tragic.

The second decision overturned a perfectly reasonable gun law in New York on the grounds that it violated a “right to self-defense”—the only problem being that a “right to self-defense” doesn’t appear in the Constitution any more frequently than “a right to abortion”.  Which is to say, never.  This obvious contradiction, however, did not seem to trouble right-wing ideologues like Samuel Alito.

The third of court’s egregiously dishonest decisions condemned the Environmental Protection Agency for “overreaching” its heretofore uncontested authority to limit fossil fuel emissions in the face of the existential threat posed by global warming.  That threat was dismissed by John Roberts, the consummately smug and condescending Chief Justice, as nothing more than “the crisis of the day,” as if the survival of humankind were a trivial nuisance compared with the sacrosanct profits of the corporations Roberts defended when he wasn’t sitting on the bench.

Thanks to the conservative cabal’s peek-a-boo, hide-and-seek theory of constitutional interpretation, gun-toting lunatics may now legally carry their murderous weapons into public places, even as women may legally be prosecuted for the “crime” of defending themselves against the consequences of rape, incest, or unwanted pregnancy.  The rest of us, meanwhile, are condemned to sit idly by as the planet burns.

There is at least one consolation in this dystopian nightmare.  It is that we can finally discard the fantasy that the Supreme Court of the United States is anything but what it has been throughout most of our history:  a cravenly political and anti-democratic institution, intent on imposing its antediluvian agenda on an unwilling country, particularly when that country does not fit its vision of what the nation should be, which is to say, white, Christian, capitalist, and quiescent.

The very idea that such a malignant and antiquated institution would, or ever could, hover cherubically above the down-and-dirty fray of politics was always an illusion.  For the better part of two hundred years, conservatives and liberals alike have paid lip service to this illusion, because the truth was too disagreeable to contemplate, too intractable to deal with, or too embarrassing to admit.  For an American politician to acknowledge that the Olympian gods of our national mythology, the “founding fathers,” might have erred so fundamentally would have violated that most self-serving American idea—that we are a morally exceptional people, whose political institutions should be a model for the rest of the world.  Such an acknowledgement would, more to the point, have amounted to a kiss of political death.

Thanks to the conservative cabal that now controls the court, that fairy tale has been exposed for the bunkum it is and always has been.  The sooner we disabuse ourselves of this ludicrous fiction, the sooner we can take the steps to end the political tyranny of an institution that is not only out of touch but out of control.  

The place to begin is by exposing and punishing members of the court like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, whose personal corruption is simply too blatant to ignore.  For years, these men have accepted lavish perks from billionaire conservative donors, not only advancing the political agenda of those donors but brazenly advertising the fact.  If Thomas and Alito were ordinary citizens, like you and me, they would already be in jail.  At the very least, they should be impeached and disbarred.  

Let us also stop pretending that a drunken sexual predator like Brett Kavanaugh is qualified to serve on the highest court in the land.  If he had not been anointed by the radical right, it is doubtful that he would have been nominated to sit on the Supreme Court in the first place.  Indeed, if he were not a child of privilege, by way of Georgetown Prep and Yale Law School, it is unlikely that he would be welcome at a backyard barbecue in Poughkeepsie.

And finally, let us admit to the fact that each and every member of the conservative cabal that now controls the court, including the Chief Justice himself, is an out-and-out liar.   In their confirmation hearings, they all promised to honor established standards of objective and dispassionate judicial process; they all promised to abide by the principle of stare decisis; they all declared that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land and therefore deserved deference.  The simple truth is, they perjured themselves and should suffer the consequences. 

No other democratic country in the world concedes to its highest court the sweeping powers we have granted to the Supreme Court of the United States.  The “mother country” of our political institutions, the United Kingdom, did not even have a supreme court until 2009, and even now, that court has no authority to overrule the actions of parliament or its prime minister.  

That we have spurned this tradition, conceding to our highest court the right to abrogate and rewrite our laws, overrule the decisions of our democratically elected institutions, and defy the obvious wishes of the American people, is an abomination.  The only possible rationale for such a concession would be an absolute guarantee that the Supreme Court was committed to justice, to upholding the rights of the powerless, and to defending individual citizens against the depredations of the powerful.  

It is abundantly clear, however, that the conservative cabal now in charge of the Supreme Court of the United States is committed, not to justice, but to the opposite principle.  Their motivating purpose is to return the country to an earlier age, when the interests of those at the top of the social and economic pyramid were immunized against any challenge from below, when women, people of color, and the most vulnerable members of our society knew their place. 

Let us finally expose the members of this cabal for who they truly are.  They are social, political, and sexual rapists hiding behind the raiment of their judicial robes.