(10-02-2020, 02:39 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The Bill of Rights contains some pretty basic values. Rights should not be added or subtracted from the bench. The Founding Fathers had a mechanism for change, and it has been ignored. Presidents have deliberately chosen Supreme Court justices who will follow political agendas rather than interpret the text or the intent of the authors. The result is a very broken legal system.
The system breaks most severely when the political leaders have the attitude that sticking it to the other side is a good idea. That is a zero-sum game in which the harm to the loser is as severe as the benefit to the winner. Good reason existed for the filibuster, but the extreme partisanship so characteristic of our time ensures gridlock. Should one side establish ideological tests for making judicial decisions and use the Supreme Court for deciding that government rightly represents economic power instead of the People (the apparent ethos behind neoliberalism) and giving undue edges to one Party in gerrymandering and in deciding elections, then we can get two decades of very bad decisions.
Quote:Scalia and Ginsburg were apparently friends, even if pursuing different legal agendas. Scalia would look at the original intent and meaning of the text. Ginsburg would pursue every excuse to believe the Founding Fathers were not prejudiced against women having political power. At least both trends were legal rather than political. We have had too many decisions where the Court will vote according to the political agenda of the president that appointed the justice. The president and senate are motivated to encourage selecting Supreme Court justices who will legislate from the bench. Depending on the president, this may mean rights are invented which would have been considered foul at the time the Constitution was invented, which includes both the liberal rights for the people and the conservative rights for the corporation.
Sometimes the Justices become troublesome to the Party whose President appointed them. It might be a way to put a highly-qualified rival out of contention for the Presidency. Think of Earl Warren.
Although flagrant violations of the Constitution must be rejected, the Constitution is a living document just to recognize the validity of Amendments following the Bill of Rights. I remember hearing someone describe himself as a "Tenth-Amendment citizen". I would guess that that means "white", because such ignores at the least the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
Quote:I will renounce both. People who cheer their faction's contempt for the Constitution are reprehensible.
Constitutional restraints are often all that keeps the majority from dispossessing, enslaving, and murdering the minority. I think of what has happened in other countries... like the Nuremberg Laws that made pariahs out of you-know-who.
Quote:This does not mean we shouldn't have a pretty busy 'never again' period coming up.
We need to undo the travesty that is Donald Trump. We need to undo the nexus between politics and corporate power. We need to close the seams within our Constitution (Karl Rove found those and drove an eighteen-wheeler through them on behalf of Dubya).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.