BULLETIN :The same forces that animated the Dred Scott (1857) Civil Rights Cases (1883), Citizens United v. FEC (2010), and Shelby v. Holder (2013) decisions have scheduled a special election for August 8 to further restrict democracy in Ohio. If you want a say in the matter, make sure you are registered to vote by MONDAY, July 10.
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In case there was any doubt, the U. S. Supreme Court ended its term last month by reaffirming that we live in a nation still organized around straight white men of means.
In little more than 24 hours, the Court’s rock-solid reactionary right-wing majority crippled affirmative action, essentially declared that LGBTQ+ had no rights that straight people were bound to respect, and for good measure reinstated all student loan debt obligations, reminding progressives, liberals, moderates, conservatives, reactionaries, and the disengaged that righteous capitalism trumps equity, fairness, and justice every day of the year.
Same as it ever was.
In moving with such deliberate speed, the Court’s dominant majority declared its official allegiance to the Make America Great Again movement.
Martin King’s hopeful dictum that the moral arc of the universe bends, however slowly, towards justice has no application to the United States Supreme Court. Practically from the nation’s birth, and most avowedly since the days of the notorious John Marshall, the Court has been less about morality and more about protecting and advancing the interests of slaveholders, expansionists, robber barons, and financiers.
Many of us who came of age during the years of the Warren Court were lulled into a false sense that the Court was a bulwark against the tyranny of bigotry and a defender of liberty consistent with the nation’s highest ideals. That was an illusion.
It is clear now what a glorious historical aberration the Warren Court was: a peculiar moment in time, lagging the election results of the New Deal era and the Roosevelt administration. That moment was seized upon by the brilliant legal strategies of Charles Hamilton Houston and his colleagues, including Thurgood Marshall, centered in the Howard University School of Law.
The expansion of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s resulted from a unique confluence of circumstances. The requirements of fighting World War II and its aftermath of a new global political and economic order made the opening of American society both inevitable and desirable. Black people in America were beneficiaries of these global forces.
But only to a point. As Steve Phillips reminded us only a few months back in a brilliant few minutes at the City Club, every advance in expanding rights and opportunities in this land of plenty has been met with fierce and unrelenting resistance.
The lesson must continually be taught: no victory, however monumental and fundamental, is permanent.
As a high school student in the early sixties, I could not get my head around this lesson. My mind was not equipped to understand how, following the defeat of the slave-holding Confederacy in the Civil War, and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, black people could be abruptly deprived of their blood-soaked rights by the arbitrary fiat of the Supreme Court via the utterly bewildering sophistry of the so-called Civil Rights Cases (1883).
My unforgettable history teacher, Henry Bragdon, offered me a skeleton key to understanding the Supreme Court’s betrayal of justice when he shared the observation of Finley Peter Dunne’s Irish Chicago bartender that “th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns.”
Yes, the Supreme Court does follow the election results, but only up to a point, and historically with a great deal of lag.
In the wake of the Warren Court, the eternal forces of resistance reaction and rollback organized and armed the Federalist Society to eradicate the possibility of even a David Souter — much less an Earl Warren or a Hugo Black — performing any sort of an about face once on the highest bench. The Federalists are training battalions of future judges in the way they should go, such that when they are enrobed they shall not depart from it.
Most Americans favor diversity and inclusion and reasonable access to abortion. By its wholesale abandonment of honest reasoning, coupled with increasing evidence of the sordid ethics of several of its majority members, the Court has forfeited much of its prestige and virtually all its mystique.
In earlier eras, the alliance between Justices and plutocrats were more decorous and discreet. As these Justices become unmasked, it is likely to be a long time before the Court regains the deference it once had. Where it once appeared as a legitimate brake on the rate of political change, today it's more likely to be seen as a puppet of the powerful, out of touch and out of step, and once again a Confederate stronghold in America's continuing civil war.
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