The Supreme Court Just Reminded Us Elections Have Consequences (As If We Needed Reminding)
Just imagine if Hillary Clinton had won instead of the twice-impeached slumlord former host of Celebrity Apprentice.
There must be something about the end of June that gets the right-wingers on the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) all cranked up.
Back when Donald Trump was running for president, his close adviser Steve Bannon pronounced his — and through him, Trump’s — agenda to “deconstruct the administrative state.”
Most people probably had no idea what he was talking about.
Those who get their “news” from right-wing hate media defended it regardless.
The billionaire-owned corporate media glossed over it because those benefiting from the deconstruction’s deregulation were perfectly fine with the resulting tax cuts.
We saw what happened.
For four years, Donald Trump sought to weaken NATO, undermine the United Nations, further massively cut taxes on the morbidly rich, eliminate environmental standards, and take a blowtorch to federal regulations intended to make us healthier, better educated, and safer.
The obsequious republican party waited 40 years for someone like Trump to come along so it could step out of the cloakroom into the daylight to destroy democracy right in front of us.
What did Bannon mean?
Look no further than the disastrous decisions the SCOTUS handed down last week— exactly one year after a tranche of anti-democratic decisions catering to right-wing evangelical so-called “Christians” and the millionaire class funding them.
In his minority opinion standing with his five radical colleagues — three of whom are Trump appointees —Chief Justice John Roberts doubled down Thursday on a position he took a decade ago in the Shelby county v Holder case when he asserted with an African American president in the White House, we are now in a “post-racial America” and no longer need a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting African American voters from race-based voting restrictions at the state level.
His opinion Thursday states:
A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.
Bye-bye, Affirmative Action.
Just like that, decades of struggle to try and level the playing field riven from generations of systemic racism are eviscerated.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joining justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in their dissent, fired back:
With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.
No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us.
Curiously, while race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities are now “unconstitutional,” legacy admissions and affirmative action in military academies remain intact.
Investigative journalist Greg Palast — not African American or belonging to a protected class — explained is his blog piece “Confessions of an
Affirmative Action Baby” how Affirmative Action even helped him obtain an education.
He wrote:
There’s no way you’d been reading this — and I could not write this — if it weren’t for affirmative action. And there’s no way on earth I could have gotten accepted to fancy-ass schools including Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, UCLA and Berkeley — without affirmative action. Because I flunked basic English.
But, thanks to affirmative action, “undeserving” me got into all those fine ruling class finishing schools. And if you don’t like it, if you think my writing career cheated a worthier and wealthier young man out of his pre-ordained slot, well, f — you!
Opponents of Affirmative Action claim that the process “robs a seat from another student”.
But the fallacy of that lies in the obvious question: Is allowing admission to someone less advantaged than another “robbing” the space from the more privileged applicant?
“Robbing”?
That implies the less-privileged applicant is illegitimate, which is the racist core of opponents’ claim.
Consider the exemptions for legacy applicants.
Couldn’t one also claim the child of a wealthy alumnus getting into a prestigious institution because Daddy went there be “robbing” the space from another?
Former George W. Bush admitted he got into the prestigious Phillips Academy Prep School and Yale University despite lousy grades.
It helped a little that Daddy Bush went there.
But that wasn’t all the damage SCOTUS inflicted on us.
Remember what justice Clarence Thomas threatened last year when the high court reversed Roe Vs. Wade: It’s just the beginning.
Activists have been waiting for the hateful decree the court handed down Friday when it sided with a far-right “Christian” web designer in Colorado who refuses to provide services for same-sex couples despite the state’s anti-discrimination law.
Now other states will inevitably follow suit in reversing decades of progress under the guise of “free speech”.
Progressive talk-show host Michaelangelo Signorile explained in his Substack newsletter “The Signorile Report”:
A self-professed Colorado website designer, Lorie Smith, said her Christian faith means she has to turn away customers wanting wedding-related services to celebrate their same-sex marriage. But she’d not actually been open for business yet in making marriage websites — nor had she been sued by any gay couple wanting her services.
That alone should have thrown out the case, as she had no standing. But the radicals had other ideas.
One glaring reason it should have been thrown out is a questionable message purportedly sent through Lorie Smith’s business, 303 Creative, web portal from a man named Stewart, whom Smith’s attorney argued is a gay man who requested “some design work done for our invites, placenames [sic] etc. We might also stretch to a website.”
But Stewart (who does not want his surname shared) was surprised when a reporter from The New Republic contacted him. In that exchange Stewart explained, “I can confirm I did not contact 303 Creative about a website. It’s fraudulent insomuch as someone is pretending to be me and looking to marry someone called Mike. That’s not me.”
Stewart has been in a heterosexual marriage for 15 years.
He added:
What’s most concerning to me is that this is kind of like the one main piece of evidence that’s been part of this case for the last six-plus years and it’s false. Nobody’s checked it. Anybody can pick up the phone, write an email, send a text, to verify whether that was correct information.
Justice Sotomayor lamented:
Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. The Court does so for the first time in its history…
…Sadly, it is also familiar. When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims.
But that’s hardly the end of the right-wing ideologues’ scorched-earth campaign against non-millionaires.
One of President Biden’s greatest in a growing string of accomplishments is last year’s signing an executive order authorizing the federal government to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt.
Naturally, republicans and the right-wing hate media they pander to decried it as “Socialism!” and claimed it “unfairly transfers the burden from those who willingly took out loans onto those who chose not to attend college or already fulfilled their commitment to pay off their loans.”
Republican-led states wasted no time in suing the Biden administration before the ink on the EO was even dry.
President Biden came out immediately to express his unwavering commitment to unveil a new plan for debt relief.
“I think the court misinterpreted the constitution,” the president explained.
Citing the 16 million people already approved for the relief program that would have freed up $10,000 to $20,000 they could have used to buy homes, start business and families, Biden lamented, “More homes would’ve been bought, more businesses would’ve been started.”
He added:
They [republicans] had no problem with billions in pandemic-related loans to businesses — including hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars for their own businesses. And those loans were forgiven. But when it came to providing relief to millions of hard-working Americans, they did everything in their power to stop it.
Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said:
The same Supreme Court that overturned Roe now refuses to follow the plain language of the law on student loan cancellation. This fight is not over. The President has more tools to cancel student debt — and he must use them.
The president’s plan now is to restore student loan debt relief through the 1965 Higher Education Act, and begin a 12-month repayment program to help borrowers avoid default if they are unable to pay in order to avoid incurring bad credit.
One would assume the republican party being the “party of business,” “job creators,” and capitalism would want prospective home buyers and business owners to have more money to contribute to the almighty economy.
But when have republicans ever cared about working people?
“Working people,” “job creators,” “the free market” are just code.
What they’re really hoping for is another economic downturn this fall and especially going into next fall, just in time for the presidential election, so they can direct all their faux outrage on how “Biden has wrecked the economy” even though his administration has grown the economy faster than any in half a century.
Just imagine if Hillary Clinton had won instead of the twice-impeached slumlord former host of Celebrity Apprentice.
She would have appointed a third of the high court, and likely none of this bloodbath over the last year would have occured.
Elections have consequences.
We continue to feel the effects of 2016’s.
Biden needs to threaten to expand the SCOTUS like Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s.
And we need to get out there in droves every election to send a message that this garbage will not stand.