I enjoyed the snapshot today (in full at the end of my
post). I hope you did as well. It reminded me of college and of THE
PELICAN BRIEF. C.I. could argue better than anyone when it came to the
law. If she was doing moot court, the place was packed for that
reason. Everyone wanted to see what she'd do. On that, she was
assigned the argument she'd have to make. So, for example, a freedom of
religion case, no one expected her to be able to do that. She did it
and she won. She knows the law.
THE
PELICAN BRIEF? C.I. and Alan J. Pakula were friends. The classroom
scene that's so important to establishing Darby was not working. That's
Julia Roberts' character. Alan asked C.I. about it and she said, let
her be right, let the audience realize she's right and let the law
disagree. That's what he did and Julia adlibbed a remark at the end of
the scene and it works.
I
share C.I.'s disgust over that ruling. She is 100% correct that it
sets up two-tier level of American citizenship. She grasps it before
others do because her brain works faster than the rest of our's do.
This is a very scary moment. The Court is arguing that it can deny
rights from some citizens. They start with gays and lesbians and they
move outward. That is how it works and you're kidding yourself if you
don't grasp that. That is why it is 100% necessary that we implement
court reform and do so immediately.
The Center for Constitutional Rights pointed out, "Together with yesterday’s decision
invalidating affirmative action, this ruling lays bare the values of
this Court. In six justices’ view, the Constitution says it is just fine
for a business to exclude someone on the basis of their protected status (LGBTQI+), but it is unconstitutional for a university to include
someone on the basis of their protected status (race). This is bigotry
masquerading as law. And, in so ruling again, this Court continues to
advance a Jim Crow jurisprudence in which the white, male, Christian
insider’s freedom is made meaningful only through the subjugation of
vulnerable populations. For this conservative movement, as for John
Calhoun or George Wallace, discrimination fuels their feelings of
freedom. These six individuals somehow retain the power to impose their
18th Century values on a democratic majority that believes in equality
and fairness. The Court has little legitimacy left."
It did a lot worse than that.
We
now, again, have two legal classes of citizenship. The Civil Rights
Movement did a great deal to end that system -- a system enshrined by a
racist Supreme Court in decisions such as 1896's PLESSY V FERGUSON --
which ruled barring equal access was not discriminating against Black
people as long as they had access to something similar -- it was
'separate but equal' -- a laughable concept then and now.
LGBTQ+
persons -- and this can be expanded out to other groups, grasp that,
this Court is just getting started -- are not full citizens anymore.
Full citizens have legal protections and rights. Period. No question
mark, no qualifier. A gay man now? He has legal protections and rights
as long as it doesn't offended some religious nut.
Clue
to the Court: Freedom of religion means the rest of us don't have to
suffer from your religious delusions that call for hatred and
discrimination.
When the ruling came down, we flashed on two things -- fetish porn and a NETFLIX documentary. Sadly, we aren't joking.
Benjamin Cantu's ELDORADO: EVERYTHING THE NAZIS HATE
is a documentary that started airing last week on NETFLIX. It deals
with the rise of Nazism in Germany and the way it rose by targeting
groups of people.
And it echoes in the US today because,
as one person points out, "Even now you can have these liberties and
they can be taken away from you."
As The Proud Boys --
little boys in mannish bodies -- have spent the last months showing up
at drag events -- obviously horny and envious -- with guns and threats,
bigots like Jonathan Turley have ignored this while freaking out over
ANTIFA repeatedly. He's a Nazi, Turley is. And his Proud Boys are the
SA in Nazi Germany. As historian Ben Miller explains in the
documentary, "The SA is the Nazis' paramilitary. They do the dirty
work. They destabilize democracy. They fight other people on the
street. They beat people up outside events."
Yeah, that's The Proud Boys.
Miller
also explains, "The SA is a really huge part of the Nazi's plan to take
control of Germany and to establish a racially pure empire, free of
Jews, free of Communists, free of disabled people, free of Roma and
Sinti people, and free of queers."
Are you getting what's happening right now?
These are not isolated incidents. This a path that certain people want to take this country down.
I
love their essay. They are right about everything and I love the way
they take on that awful ditz Katie Halper. It's bad enough when people
can't see what's going on but when they refuse to? That's even worse.
She's made her life purpose to be useless. Here they are on Katie Halper:
Katie has two platforms: THE KATIE HALPER SHOW and USEFUL IDIOTS.
She's made clear that abortion really isn't an issue to her on either.
She's made clear that the LGBTQ+ community does not exist in her eyes.
She's made clear that she doesn't want to talk to women. So what if
they make up 50.4% of the US population, she's only got time for them to
be on 3% of her episodes.
She was never a feminist.
Last Friday, she finally stepped out of her Phyllis Schlafly closet.
She needs to be her true self because she's got nothing else.
ROLLING
STONE isn't hiring her back. THE HILL fired her as well. JACOBIN
hasn't been interested in her since the whole explosion that saw Katie's
former co-host of THE KATIE HALPER SHOW abandon ship and stick with
JACOBIN RADIO, USEFUL IDIOTS is sinking in streams . . . Professionally, she's become the daughter her father can't marry off.
At last, some symmetry between her work life and her personal life.
Since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision 13 months ago, which overturned Roe v. Wade and
deprived women of the constitutional right to access abortion, the
ultra-right majority on the court has engaged in a rampage against basic
democratic rights and the social rights of the working class.
This
culminated Friday in two decisions with the same 6-3 split among the
justices: to declare unconstitutional the Biden administration’s limited
reduction of student loan debt owed to the US government; and to
endorse the “right” of a commercial web designer to refuse to create
materials for the wedding of a gay couple.
The class character of
the first decision is obvious: an executive action by the federal
government to bail out wealthy bank depositors is constitutional, but
not a limited action to help debt-burdened students. The second decision
destroys a constitutional right to be free of discrimination, while
paying lip service to the First Amendment. The court declares that the
web designer can justify her bigotry on the basis of “freedom of
religion.”
I'm stuck here. These are
appalling decisions that need to be called out and they are part of many
others including MARCUS DEANGELO JONES V DEWAYNE HENDRIX from the week
before last. At THIRD, we didn't do "truest" statements this week --
where we quote from an article, report or video segment or speech. I'm
glad. Because I know one of the nominees would have been a Friday piece
at WSWS. And I didn't agree that it deserved a truest. WSWS published
an article covering the student loan debt decisions. A bad decision by
the Court that will have real consequences. WSWS then published an
article about the bad decision where the Court overturns Affirmative
Action -- a monumental injustice. And it tried to fold into that
article what Patrick Martin calls above 'refuse to create materials for
the wedding of a gay couple.'
That is the worst
decision from a legal stand point and I get that most people do not
grasp the law in this country. But if you want to destroy a community,
that's the decision to use.
They can build on it, they can expand to include other groups.
It is a decision out of Nazi Germany.
The Court no longer believe in equaltiy.
Any
legal scholar should look at the decision and tell you what happened is
there is now a two-tier system of American citizenship. There is a
system where straights (and assumed straights) have full rights and
gays and lesbians do not. There is no pretense of equal in the eyes of
the law.
That should frighten the hell out of everyone.
This is not minor. We are supposed to be built on a system where the law is fair and the law is equal.
You have the right to this, I have the right to this.
We have to go back to the 1800s to find something similar.
Discrimination is okay -- legally okay -- and we're pretending this is something minor.
Again,
don't think, "Well I'm never going to have a same-sex wedding." This
can be expanded. This is something out of A HANDMAID'S TALE and the
fact that so many people do not appear to grasp that goes to how easy it
is for rights and liberties to be stolen from all of us.
If
you're not getting this, you are part of the problem. You need to
grasp what the law now says and what a huge shift this is.
And on the right, those who are openly on the right-wing, are celebrating. They grasp what just happened.
The
ones who are hiding their right-wing nature? Well I don't see a word
on this from RFK Junior. I see Junior Tweeted repeatedly on Sunday
about releasing the records on his uncle's death. Because that is the
most important thing right? Oh, and he made time to apologetically call
out the case overturning affirmative action -- apologetically and
pathetically because if he doesn't hold onto his right-wing base, he has
nothing.
The last name means very little
when, many, many weeks later, you still can't pull together a campaign.
You're still trying to hang out with Moms For Liberty and you're too
much a boy to stand up. RFK -- Senior -- was not a saint by any means
-- as many women could have attested -- but at the end he did find a
voice. I'd say, "Took him along enough," but he was only 42. Junior
is 69 and can't find his voice.
RFK, at the end, spoke for the people in need, the migrant workers, the people under assault.
Having to wear a mask during the height of COVID was not an assault.
And I'm getting tired of all the freaks on this issue.
It
was a pandemic. We never told you what to do here. We didn't shame
Eric Clapton or try to -- I even noted that he would probably come out
of the pandemic looking good. We didn't worship at Fauci. He was lousy
at his job and he should have been fired.
But
we also grasped that it was a pandemic and that many people were just
trying to survive it, not to hurt anyone and not to hurt themselves.
That reality is lost in RFK Jr.'s campaign of crazy.
You didn't want the vaccine, you really didn't have to get it.
I
didn't get it until the end. I was on chemo and a hundred other things
and my doctors wouldn't let me -- a fact that I made known here
repeatedly.
I don't know of anyone who went to prison for refusing the vaccine.
But it's a big issue to Crowd Crazy to this day.
Because they felt so damn impotent.
Guess
what, butt hurt, so did the rest of the world. It's what happens when
something no one is expecting sweeps up the planet.
But that's all he and Naomi Wolf and other increasingly unhinged people have to offer.
Did Fauci lie?
He
lied repeatedly. We noted it repeatedly. It's why he should have been
fired. He certainly should have been fired when Joe Biden was sworn
in. He had repeatedly contradicted himself and lost the trust of too
much of the public.
COVID continues. The COVID
measures are gone. We have real problems to deal with. That doesn't
mean journalists shouldn't look into what took place or how consensus
was formed or forced behind closed doors. It does mean it's not really a
campaign issue.
Unless you're some right-wing
crazy who can't deal with the fact that COVID actually scared you. As
it should have. A world-wide pandemic is scary. But you can't deal
with your own fear, so you're scared and pissed off and looking for the
craziest fool who'll speak to that and you run to Junior.
Ava and I wrote about the two-tiered citizenship that now exists in the US in "Media: Corrupt Court, Corrupt YOUTUBE" on Sunday at THIRD and here I posted multiple interviews and commentaries and statements.
An e-mail asked why I didn't include the ACLU?
This is their statement:
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court this morning issued its ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis. David Cole, Legal Director for the American Civil Liberties Union, offered the following response:
“The
Supreme Court held today for the first time that a business offering
customized expressive services has the right to violate state laws
prohibiting such businesses from discrimination in sales. The Court’s
decision opens the door to any business that claims to provide
customized services to discriminate against historically-marginalized
groups. The decision is fundamentally misguided. We will continue to
fight to defend laws against discrimination from those who seek a
license to discriminate.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Colorado filed an amicus brief
urging the Supreme Court to reject the First Amendment challenge to a
Colorado civil rights law requiring businesses open to the public to
treat customers equally.
Yeah, I took a hard pass on that weak ass statement from a group made of attorneys. Instead, we offered the Center for Constitutional Rights:
June 30, 2023 - In response to the
Supreme Court ruling that businesses may deny services to LGBTQI+
people, the Center for Constitutional Rights released the following
statement:
Today,
in its latest display of its political activism, the Supreme Court
sanctioned discrimination by giving businesses that engage in
"expressive conduct" a license to deny services to LGBTQI+ people. We
have known for a long time that in the eyes of the Court, there are only
two Constitutional rights that matter: the First Amendment right to
religious expression and the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Nonetheless, today’s decision was crushing. It deals another blow to a
community already under attack in legislatures across the country, by
the very same movement that claims the allegiance of six justices on the
Supreme Court.
Public
accommodations laws regulate what businesses must do, not what they must
think, if they seek the public benefit of accessing the public
marketplace. Such nondiscrimination laws, like the one in Colorado, are
designed to ensure that LGBTQI+ people can freely shop for services like
everyone else, rather than being required to shop for businesses that
don’t discriminate against them. The right-wing justices have once again
signaled that their mission is to dismantle laws that protect
marginalized communities and to use the law to back punitive and
exclusionary social hierarchies. As Justice Sotomayor lays out in the
dissent, “[t]hose who would subordinate LGBT[QI+] people have often done
so with the backing of law.”
In
this case, the Court was so determined to carry out its mission that it
bypassed Constitutional requirements of standing by weighing in on an
imaginary dispute concocted by conservative legal activists and issuing
an advisory opinion, so that they could legislate policy.
The
Religious Liberty Clauses of the First Amendment have been historically
used to protect minority religions against discrimination by
majoritarian orthodoxy and to advance a pluralistic, egalitarian
democracy. It is thus especially perverse that this Court would delight
in producing the exact opposite, anti-democratic result: granting
orthodox Christianity an imagined constitutional freedom to discriminate
against the minority LGBTQI+ community. And, as Justice Sotomayor
emphasized, the decision is not limited; it could give license for
businesses to discriminate against interracial couples because of the
(pervasive) extremist-evangelicalist commitment to segregation.
Together
with yesterday’s decision invalidating affirmative action, this ruling
lays bare the values of this Court. In six justices’ view, the
Constitution says it is just fine for a business to exclude someone on the basis of their protected status (LGBTQI+), but it is unconstitutional for a university to include
someone on the basis of their protected status (race). This is bigotry
masquerading as law. And, in so ruling again, this Court continues to
advance a Jim Crow jurisprudence in which the white, male, Christian
insider’s freedom is made meaningful only through the subjugation of
vulnerable populations. For this conservative movement, as for John
Calhoun or George Wallace, discrimination fuels their feelings of
freedom. These six individuals somehow retain the power to impose their
18th Century values on a democratic majority that believes in equality
and fairness. The Court has little legitimacy left.
We
reject these cruel and unlawful decisions, and the cowardly attempts by
a right-wing movement to wield the Constitution to protect white power
and deny the human rights of the multitude. But human rights cannot be
suspended by reactionaries in robes. And they cannot be secured by even
enlightened court rulings. If there is solace to be found today, it is
in the knowledge that that task before us is the same as it was
yesterday: to resist, organize, and unite. Our potential collective
power, and only that, offers hope of liberation and full human dignity
for LGBTQI+ people and other marginalized communities.
I
cannot believe how many people are missing the point on this. I have
nothing against a gay but I own a bed and breakfast and I just can't
allow a gay into my home with another gay because my Bible tells me it
is wrong. Or: I own a small hotel in New Hampshire and I rent rooms out
by the hour but not to a gay because of my Bible. You have no idea how
this can expand out. The Court knew. They knew what they were doing.
They are a corrupt Court and there needs to be change immediately.
Condemning the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court as corrupt and "heavily politicized," U.S. Reps. Ro Khanna
and Don Beyer on Friday reintroduced legislation to impose term limits
for the nine justices in order to "restore judicial independence."
Hours after the court ruled that businesses can refuse services to LGBTQ+ people and struck down
President Joe Biden's student loan debt relief program, Khanna
(D-Calif.) said that the framers of the Constitution established
lifetime appointments for justices on the nation's highest court in
order "to ensure impartiality," but recent rulings by the six right-wing
members of the panel's supermajority have not held up that standard.
"The Supreme Court's decision to block student debt relief will put many hardworking Americans at risk of default and will be a disaster for our economy," said
Rep. Ro Khanna. "Our Founding Fathers intended for lifetime
appointments to ensure impartiality. The decision today demonstrates how
justices have become partisan and out of step with the American public.
I'm proud to reintroduce the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular
Appointments Act to implement term limits to rebalance the court and
stop extreme partisanship."
The legislation would create an
18-year term limit for justices appointed after the law was enacted.
Justices would be permitted to serve on lower courts after their term
was up.
Beyer (D-Va.) said the time has come to impose term
limits following numerous partisan decisions by the Supreme Court,
including its overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, and revelations about undisclosed financial ties that right-wing Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch have had to Republican megadonors and operatives who have had business before the court.
"For
many Americans, the Supreme Court is a distant, secretive, unelected
body that can make drastic changes in their lives without any
accountability," said Beyer. "Recent partisan decisions by the Supreme
Court that destroyed historic protections for reproductive rights,
voting rights, and more have undermined public trust in the Court—even
as inappropriate financial relationships between justices and
conservative donors raised new questions about its integrity."
Currently, said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), "six extremist, unelected activists" are doing "the bidding of billionaire Republican donors from the bench."
"This
illegitimate Supreme Court has become a cesspool of corruption and is
in urgent need of reform," she said. "It's time to end lifetime
appointments to the Supreme Court."
A poll by Marist College in April found
that 68% of Americans back term limits for Supreme Court justices while
just 37% of respondents said they had confidence in the high court.
The judicial watchdog group Fix the Court endorsed Khanna and Beyer's proposal, noting that from the nation's founding until 1970, Supreme Court justices served 15 years on average.
"That
number has nearly doubled in the last few decades, as the power the
court has abrogated to itself has also increased exponentially," said the group.
The current system has allowed Supreme Court justices to "possess unchecked power for life," said
Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court. "Luckily, there's a
popular, apolitical way to fix this: by requiring future justices to
take 'senior status' after 18 years, at which point they'd fill in at
SCOTUS when needed, rotate down to a lower court, or retire."
"This
idea forms the basis of Rep. Khanna's bill," he said, "and I'm pleased
to support his work to establish fundamental guardrails for the most
powerful, least accountable part of our government."
Affirmative
action is a needed program. Programs can be ended and they can be
restarted. Congress, for example, can (and should) pass a new program.
But
when we're dealing with the highest court in the land stripping rights
from citizens? Do you know how hard that is to come back from?
If
you work for THE NATION, you clearly don't because they have nothing on
their main page about this decision. They've got the student debt
decision, they've got affirmative action, nothing on this.
And
yet a group of Americans have been given less-than citizenship by a
corrupt Court. They are no longer full citizens worthy of full
equality. They are less-than.
And that should leave everyone outraged and apalled.
But
some idiots don't grasp how it starts and how, if it's not called out,
it builds. The Bible was a justification for slavery, for example. The
Bible's not a manual for no-fault divorce. You want to see where the
Court builds next as they go through the list of denying full rights to
American citizens?
You didn't read history? You didn't Margaret Atwood? You can't catch a documentary on Nazi Germany?
All
the decisions handed down were awful and unfair. Only one, however,
gives the Court the power and the way forward to remove rights from
citizens.
The Court needs to change and it needs to change now.
The
Democrats need to come up with a plan for Court reform that includes
term limits and includes an ethics code and includes accountability.
Now.
Gina asked me to note this from Marianne's campaign.
