THE SUPREME COURT - ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY AGAIN

Too often in our nations’ history the Supreme Court has been dominated by judges who rule on the wrong side of history and against the clear wishes of the American people.

Today in this new 21st century the Roberts Court (led by a Reagan era Justice department staffer) is again standing against history as it attempts to undo many of the reforms of the 60's and 70's.  The Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with the absurd reasoning that since the Act has been successful and all Americans are now assured of voting rights it is no longer necessary to keep in place the federal protections that led to that success. The blind justices sitting on their exalted bench feel that forty years of elections free from racial discrimination against some electors trumps the two hundred and fifty years of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

This Court is also determined to undo women’s 9th amendment rights to reproductive freedom of choice (Griswold v Conn. and Roe v. Wade) by chipping away at those rights in the name of other rights (freedom of speech and religion). So freedom of religion allows an employer to offer health insurance to employees that doesn’t cover anything that the employer doesn’t believe in; and freedom of speech allows demonstrators to intimidate women who wish to seek reproductive health care. (The Supreme Court of course can keep demonstrators away from their doors)

Nor satisfied with curbing the rights of minorities and women the Court has now gone after labor unions by limiting the use of Agency shop. Decades ago in response to those who felt that compulsory union membership was an infringement of workers' rights a public policy consensus was developed around a system where those who didn’t want to join a union, but would benefit from the terms of union negotiated contracts, would pay dues to the union: seemed fair to all sides. Now the Court weighs in against that concept - again in a limited way but clearly foreshadowing its willingness to go further.  And, in a case that effectively consigns part time women employees to going back to non representation and lower wages.

In what I can only conclude is a strategy both clever and disingenuous. The conservative Justices have determined to use some rights as means to curtail others - so the 1st amendment overpowers the 9th amendment; the 14th amendment seems to be often ignored; the 2nd amendment (misread) trumps them all and the rights of corporations who are now given some mystical form of personhood are given a sanctity that only an oligarch would commend.

In the 1850's the Taney Court became the protector of Slavery with the Dred Scott decision that even went to the point of declaring that no free Negro could be considered an American citizen. The racist decisions of that Court were ultimately overturned by three constitutional amendments; passed after a bloody Civil War that cost over 600,000 lives and millions of dollars of property.

In the 1890's the Court empowered robber barons as they attempted to monopolize industries and beat down workers efforts to organize; and that court also legitimized state enacted segregation laws.  The Populist and later the Progressive movements rallied enough people to eventually regulate the large monopolies.  It took another Court, and a national popular movement (non-violent but often met with attendant violence), to end 60+ years of the effects of the Plessy v Ferguson ruling and dismantle legal segregation and end lynching and indiscriminate racial killings.

In the 1930's the Court dominated by conservative old men attempted to gut the New Deal by killing most of the first laws passed by Congress to reform the economic factors that led to the Great Depression. The American people by re-electing FDR in 1936 and again in 1940 turned the Court around; first because the Judges were intimidated by Roosevelt's’ revival of US Grant’s court expansion plan, and second by FDR’s serving long enough to replace most of the old judges.

The American people, whose progress of the past century in social and economic matters has been steady and strong, must in the upcoming elections support Progressive (which in today's context means Democratic) candidates so the Supreme Court can again be turned around and headed in the progressive direction.  As in the past the Supreme Court and its decisions will be rejected as reactionary and anti-democratic. 

2 July 2014