Volume 1 Number 2

You wonder how those five Conservative justices sleep at night: Chief Justice Roberts, Associate Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas. Time after time these five have come up with the wildest and damaging rulings, rulings that interpret the law in favor the rich and powerful to the detriment of the rest of us.

The justices, in making their rulings, must rely on a combination of their interpretation of the Constitution and the precedents set by earlier Supreme Court justices. One imagines them in richly paneled, heavily draped, lofty chambers contemplating deep thoughts and then handing out decisions that bolster what is perceived as their strict interpretation of the law, and damn the consequences. They twist and dodge and come up with some ridiculous justifications of a decision they want to make.

One wonders: do they in their deliberations take into account what effect their actions are going to have on people? Do they sign off on some particularly egregious law and just shrug their shoulders with a, ‘That is that. Now on to the next one.’ ?

Writing in The Atlantic in June 2014, Dahlia Lithwick says, “The five conservatives on the bench have shown less and less solicitude for the rights of women, workers, voters, minorities, the elderly, the environment, the poor, and most criminal defendants.”

In June of 2014 they did it again. This time the Court ruled against women’s health care by denying them the right, in some cases, to have access to contraceptives. This was done in another 5-4 split decision in the now famous Hobby Lobby Case. The Court can be expected to double down on this dubious decision in the soon to be decided Little Sisters of the Poor Case.

Let’s examine some of the other cases that the Supreme Court has dealt with in recent years and their consequences, all passed by a 5-4 conservative majority.

Case: Striking Down the Voting Rights Act of 1965; June 2013

The Issue: States complained that by the continued presence of the 1965 Act they were still being penalized for sins of many decades ago and Federal approval of their voting procedures was no longer necessary.

The Decision: Justice Roberts in the majority ruling found for the plaintiffs by saying, “Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” The Act was, therefore, virtually gutted.

The Result: Accordingly, in less than one year after the act was repealed, seven of the nine states that the law had been written for, enacted various types of voter discrimination. (Source: Propublica November 1, 2013.)

This was done with the consequence that some of the neediest among us are denied the sacred right and symbol of citizenry in our country, the vote.

Case: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission; June 25, 2013

The Issue: A lower court had found that the release and distribution of a film highly critical of Hilary Clinton in 2008 violated an existing law.

That morphed into a much larger stage, by questioning whether the Bipartisan Campaign Reform ACT of 2002 (BRCA, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act) had the right to regulate campaign contributions by corporations or unions.

The Decision: “Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion found that the BCRA prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and union violated the First Amendment’s protection of free speech,” said Jeffrey Tobin in a May 21, 2012 article in the New Yorker

The Result: This ruling effectively freed corporations and unions to spend as much money as they wished to directly advocate for the candidates of their choice and to defeat others. It was as if “every dollar could now vote.”

Armed with seemingly unlimited funds from the Koch Brothers, multi-billionaire industrialists, Citizens United has backed candidates who support their agenda.

They use the names of essentially bogus organizations with appealing names like Citizens for a Sound Economy and Americans for Prosperity. These groups backed in elections Libertarian, Tea Party and conservatives candidates. Citizens United was successful in campaigns for such extremist stalwarts as Ted Cruz and Michelle Bachman.

People are overwhelmingly against these unlimited campaign funds. It is recognized by our citizenry that a few of the ultra rich are doing great harm to our country in their search for more money and more power. This is aided and abetted by another out-of-bounds Supreme Court ruling.

Case: Bush v. Gore; The Disputed Presidential Election of 2000.

Issue: The presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore all came down to one state— Florida. The vote in this state was so close that only some 500 votes separated the two candidates, with Bush leading. The Republican Party petitioned the Court to step in and stop a Florida state recount then underway and declare Bush the winner.

The Decision: The Supreme Court said that the recount should be stopped and George Bush was declared the President-elect. In the Digital History ID 3377 it states that, in a late night decision, “They said that the recount violates the principle that ‘all votes must be counted equally’ and there was not enough time to conduct a new count that would meet constitutional muster.”

The Result: The Court signaled that they were willing to defy the Constitution in order to promote the candidate of their choice. President Bush then encouraged acts and legislation that continue to haunt the country today and will do so for many years.

He got us into a war in Iraq on a false premise. That adventure cost the lives of over four thousand young American soldiers and several thousand more in Afghanistan plus many thousands more critically injured.

President Bush was also instrumental in lowering the federal tax rate, which, tied to the cost of the Iraq war, that ran into trillions of dollars, caused the stock market to tremble and the economy to slow. Coupled with ignoring the housing market’s threat of collapse, caused by “liar loans,” the economy was sent into a tailspin and millions of jobs were lost. We are still recovering from its effects.

Can nothing be done to stop these five judges from blithefully continuing to wreak havoc on the core of our social, economic and political agenda?

Perhaps such a movement could succeed if it were done in a nonpartisan way. Here are three examples of how this could be accomplished, that have merit and were cited in the Angry Bureaucrat blog of April 10, 2010.

  • Establish term limits for Supreme Court Justices.

  • In order to overturn a law passed by Congress, some kind of super-majority Supreme Court vote would be required.

  • Having the Supreme Court play a secondary role to Congress in having the last say in political legislation.

The sad truth is that the Supreme Court has long since evolved from being a constitutional judge to being a “partisan tennis match.” We even, without irony or outrage, refer to the Court’s “liberal” wing and “conservative” wing, forgetting there should be only a single “constitutional bloc.” (Source: Posted on July 19, 2010 by AlterNet.)

One is reminded or a 1982 film The Verdict starring Paul Newman. In a tense courtroom scene, a nurse has been wronged by powerful, unscrupulous men. Giving testimony against them she cries out, “Who were these men? Who were these men?”

So in the same vein it can be asked, “Who were these justices? Who were these justices?

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