Dear Justice Sotomayor,
I’m writing to you because at least until now, I’ve felt that you were one of the few “Supreme Court” “justices” worth a damn. I’m a 69-year-old Californian. When it comes to the way in which our government operates, I’ve never felt more despair than I currently do. Of the money, by the money, and for the money seems a more fitting description of where things currently stand; maybe I’m just naïve and that’s just the way it has always been. I daresay that the founders (slaveholders and all) are probably spinning in their graves at the current state of this country.
I spent the morning listening to the Supreme Court hearing Colorado’s argument to exclude the former president from their ballot. It seems to me that the intent behind the Fourteenth Amendment Section 3 couldn’t be much clearer: the only interpretation that makes any common sense is that someone who has taken an oath to the constitution who then foments an insurrection against it should be disqualified from ever again taking office. All I heard today was a bunch of legalese and obfuscation—irrelevant minutia twisted to the point that it bore no relevance to the actual matter at hand. If this is the way the law actually works (which I’m afraid today only confirmed), the law, and everyone who practices it are worthless—a playground for fancy people to weave fanciful yarns that avoid dealing with real issues, where the lawyer with the wickedest tongue and deepest pockets behind him wins, and everyone else loses. I was disgusted in general and especially on the verge of vomiting every time Alito went off on another one of his irrelevant and obfuscatory hypotheticals. It seems to me that all of you are hiding behind your lifetime appointments, your black robes, and your high and mightiness when in reality, you’re all afraid to confront the real problems that our aging democracy is experiencing. I’m actually grateful that most of my life is behind me and I won’t have to be around to see the junkpile y’all are making of this country.
My despair comes from the apparent breakdown in checks and balances, whereby one individual with bad intentions can break down the system to the extent that he can figuratively shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not only not lose voters, but never have to pay any consequences whatsoever other than an obscenely high price for legal services that in the end, he gets his cult followers to cover. With hundreds of his followers already serving time for their involvement in his scheme to defy the will of the voters, it’s super depressing that he is still out there spewing his divisive vitriol, continuing to pick at the moral fibre of our system. The mastermind continues to wreck and ruin, while the victims of his grift are locked up. It’s the same old same old, isn’t it, with jails filled with people caught for smoking pot, while the people who are actively trying to tear down our entire world walk free and continue to spew their horridness on their way to the bank.
I just have one question: If states are responsible for managing voting in this country, and they are disallowed from enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment Section 3, then who can enforce it? And if you tell me Congress, then ipso facto, the Fourteenth Amendment Section 3 is worthless, because Congress is CLEARLY INCAPABLE of doing anything other than rubber-stamping everything Donald Trump tells them to do. The founders, flawed as they were, clearly tried to design a government that would disallow a narcissistic tyrant from gaining absolute power, but I think just like none of them could have imagined computers, or automatic weapons, or nuclear bombs, or global warming, or any of the other problems that are part of contemporary life, they really couldn’t imagine a president who is so devoid of a moral compass and so clearly focused on tearing down every institution and law that forms our country’s fibre, for his own enrichment, and God forbid to once and for all pardon his almighty self from any responsibility now and forever. Any y’all just watch it float by and do nothing! I think y’all are playing with fire. I’m deeply despairing that all of you are powerless to do what is obviously the right thing.
And the sad thing is that I’m not at all alone. Virtually everyone I know is feeling like this country is sliding into a hellish nightmare of Donald Trump’s creation. You’re in the rare position to do something about it. I wish you would.
Sincerely,
Busta Cretin