Tag Archives: SCOTUS

History, Politics & Current Affairs

When the Supreme Court Grants Immunity to Rampaging Monsters

Millions voted for Trump despite plentiful warnings that he’d fill the Supreme Court with corrupt far-right activists in the pay of conservative billionaires who’d enable anti-democratic power grabs. Millions didn’t believe Trump could be so deeply hateful and vengeful. They refused to believe that he’d gleefully attack the laws, customs, welfare, and the Constitution of the United States that he was hired to protect.

Yet here we are.

Now the Supreme Court’s intentional delays and anti-Constitutional rulings have removed the possibility of a public trial examining Trump’s treasonous incitement of a deadly riot until after November’s presidential election. Six “justices” have impeded justice for a man who believed his own vice president deserved a public lynching on the Capitol grounds because of a refusal to subvert Constitutional requirements at Trump’s command.

Those who voted for Trump in 2016 were too naive and trusting, and too willing to ignore the signs of his incipient fascism. In their fear and misapprehension, they made excuses for his blatant and repeatedly proven financial corruption, racism, and misogyny. They bought his lies and repeated them in his service. They have no excuses now.

Trump has shown us who he is, repeatedly, publicly, and dramatically, thousands of times. We all know what he wants to do.

But building hatred toward those who voted us into this deadly, dangerous, chaotic man’s orbit will not stop him. That kind of vengeful thinking builds monsters like Trump, and leads to terrorism and civil war. We must love what this nation could be enough to fight for it—nonviolently and lawfully. And we must love the elements of human decency that most people, including those who consider voting for him, still hold in their hearts. We must remember their humanity. Let’s reach out in kindness, despite the irrational fears and anger that Trump has so masterfully created in them. The need to save our democracy should be greater to us than the desire to avoid annoyance and frustration, or the impulse to smugly insult Trump supporters’ choices and fears.

Does that mean we need to be polite and quiet when they roll over us? Never. We must be bold and loud and persistent. But we must respect others’ humanity as we amplify truths and persistently correct misapprehensions about Trump. We must point to the current administration’s successes, and remind people of Trump’s egregious actions while in power.

Do not be defeatist or fatalistic. When you’re fighting a monster who’s burning the gates to your city, you don’t give in because it’s tiring and sweaty work. You don’t take a nap when a fire-breathing dragon sets your baby’s crib alight. If we give in, our home will burn to the ground if we don’t do our part to save it.

We’re all tired. We’re all disgusted. So were millions in Hitler’s Germany who used their disgust over and fear of and exhaustion with fascism as excuses to turn their backs on the destruction of their nation from within. If they made it out alive, they had to live with the consequences of their fear and inaction for the rest of their lives. They had to watch their beautiful and beloved homeland’s people (and people from around the world) lose freedoms, be ground in the dirt, suffer, even die because of their leader’s unchecked power.

Don’t set yourself up to feel that kind of sorrow and shame.

Get angry.

Push back.

Speak up.

VOTE.

At Top:

The Statue of Liberty during a solar eclipse, June 2021 | Anthony Quintano, Wikimedia Commons (CC-by-2.0)

Articles

The Founders’ Intent

Declaration of Independence, an 1819 painting by John Trumble, shows Jefferson at the center of a group of men presenting their draft on June 28, 1776

Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant but deeply flawed man who viewed only white men as being deserving of the rights of full citizenship. To further his expansionist plans, he began the process of Indian tribal removal from the newly acquired Northwest Territory, which began genocidal policies that ravaged native populations and stripped native people of their rights, homes, and lives. Knowing that slavery was evil, he forced his children born of Sally Hemings, whom he enslaved and impregnated, to live their lives as slaves instead of freeing them.

Jefferson was also a inventor, scholar, writer, and, of course, one of the most prominent of our so-called Founding Fathers. He is considered all-wise and beyond reproach by many Second Amendment fetishists. The so-called originalists on the Supreme Court say we must follow “the founders’ intent,” and base their rulings on the explicitly expressed opinions of rich, white, largely slave-owning men like Jefferson. Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh in particular express a determination to follow the intent of men dead for two centuries unwaveringly, as if they were infallible and holy. This backwards view assumes that no new understanding of humanity or science or the world around us, no historical or cultural shifts—in short, nothing has happened in the past 250 years might justly influence how we see the world.

For all his many grave faults, Jefferson was an educated and worldly man obsessed with expanding his understanding of statecraft, science, human nature, and the world around him. It takes no stretch of the imagination to recognize that the world view of the originalists is antithetical to his values. The idea that all human enlightenment that might influence jurisprudence and improve the new  nation he so cherished should end with his own life experience would have shocked and appalled him.

If we play devil’s advocate and assume for a moment that sticking to “the founders’ intent” is a valid way to mete out justice, what Jefferson actually said he believed is of great consequence. If we are to follow his guidance, shouldn’t we consider his intent as expressed in his own writings?

One prominent example of his intent can be found in the words carved into the Jefferson Memorial itself:

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”