Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
In the midst of crisis, the happenings of the immediate moment all too easily overwhelm our ability to keep the overall picture in mind. When multiple crises unfold simultaneously, it becomes even easier to lose track of how we have arrived at our predicaments of the moment. On the judiciary front, Amy Coney Barrett embodies the dangers of the current crisis as it affects every wing of the Democratic Party, progressive activists of all races, genders, and missions, and the working class (anybody who must earn a wage to eat). It’s not just the 18th Century originalist meanings of the founders she wants to take us back to.
Adam Cohen has written a book to help us remember that this crisis has a long history. The rightward swing of the court didn’t just happen. It’s been more than half a century in the making. At The Nation, Randall Kennedy has taken a look at that book in Politicians in Robes: The Supreme Court’s war against democracy. Some brief excerpts follow:
In Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen argues that for half a century, America’s highest court has waged “an unrelenting war” on the poor while championing the rich. The Supreme Court, he laments, has consigned to legal helplessness those reduced to government welfare subsidies, even in the face of unjustified deprivations. Its “campaign finance decisions have expanded the rights of wealthy individuals and corporations to use their money to gain influence over government.” Rulings “on partisan gerrymandering, voter ID, the Voting Rights Act, and voter roll purges have diminished the ability of those with little money to use the one thing they have at their disposal to win influence over government: their votes.”
Cohen, a former New York Times editorial board member, proceeds to argue that “the Court’s decisions involving the rights of workers…have had a devastating impact on the economic standing of low- and middle-income Americans,” denying damage awards when workers are treated unfairly and leaving them bereft of the wage and benefit premiums that come with union membership. [...]
When Cohen lambastes Citizens United, he begins by complaining that the court’s majority was “almost lawless, in its rush to overturn well-established law.” But would he object had the cases targeted for overruling been deplorables like Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), or Korematsu v. United States (1944)? The law is ever enmeshed in politics and in the service of one powerful interest or another.
We should become more realistic in our estimation of the Supreme Court, recognizing that the justices are politicians in robes, though they pursue their agendas somewhat differently from those in the White House and Congress. Teasing out the similarities and differences is a task that no one has thus far accomplished satisfactorily. But the political character of the Supreme Court is clear, notwithstanding its own and others’ strenuous efforts at obfuscation. Roberts chastised Donald Trump for referring to a judge by the president who nominated him. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges,” the chief justice declared. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” But Trump, awful as he is, gets the better of this dispute. There were Nixon judges; they bequeathed us Rodriguez and Milliken. Similarly, there are Trump judges. What they will bequeath us, only the future can tell, though their provenance hardly inspires confidence.
In Supreme Inequality, Cohen argues persuasively that the Republicans have managed the politics of the judiciary much more effectively than the Democrats. Throughout the book he returns to an obvious but important point: Supreme Court decisions are determined by the particular justices who sit on the court, which is determined in turn by the presidents who nominate them, the senators who ratify them, and the citizens who vote for both. This largely explains the trajectory of the Supreme Court since the 1960s. [...]
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"Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgender people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation." ~~Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Blackwater U.S. Uh-oh:
Two days after Blackwater USA employees opened fire and killed as many as 11 Iraqi civilians whose only crime was getting in the "security contractors" way, Blackwater's employee, the State Department said:
It's also important to remember that this convoy was attacked...
There was -- the basic fact is that there was an attack on the convoy.
I understand that the convoy was attacked and that there was a response.
And a Blackwater USA spokesman claimed:
Blackwater regrets any loss of life, but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life.
And what reason would the State Department and Blackwater have had to lie? I mean, besides the nearly 200 times Blackwater had fired on Iraqi civilians in the past, or the time a drunk Blackwater employee murdered a bodyguard of the Iraqi vice president, or the more than $1 billion in contracts Blackwater has received from this administration.