Tag Archives: Clarence Thomas

Political Rants

Our remaining option: A Million Mutinies Now

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As you well know, the other shoe dropped last week regarding Roe v. Wade, which is now history. The joyless anti-abortion zealots up the street from me must be enjoying the closest thing they know to a celebration. Maybe they’ll take the baby-float mobile out for a ride. (No, seriously: they had a vehicle with a plastic baby on the roof and P.A. speakers through which they would read anti-abortion screeds, inaudible because of their cheap audio gear. We called it the “baby float”.)

I wrote a post on the impending abortion decision a couple of weeks ago entitled “The Right To Be Forced Into Childbirth“. What I didn’t get deeply into then was the degree of fraud Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court committed during their confirmation hearings. That was, of course, their way not only of protecting themselves but of offering their supporters cover by gaslighting everyone who had paid any attention to their careers up to that point.

Perjury and Prevarication

Let’s take Gorsuch, son of Anne Gorsuch Buford, Reagan’s EPA administrator who tried to dismantle the agency, partly through sheer incompetence. (Looks like her son is going to get another shot at it via their upcoming ruling.) During his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch acknowledged the power of precedence with regard to Roe, and affirmed that a “good judge” should take it as seriously as in any other case. Then came last Friday.

How about Kavanaugh, lover of beer, bro of Squee, best bud of P.J.? Kavanaugh referred to Roe as “settled law” and an “important precedent …. reaffirmed many times.” Sure, he suggested that he might be persuaded to overturn it, but who reads the fine print? He made comforting cooing sounds, and the senators nodded contentedly.

I’m not sure what Justice Barrett could possibly have said to counteract her part in publishing a full-page anti abortion ad in the New York Times. She bleated some gas about following the rules of stare decisis, and like her reactionary brethren, hid the ball in plain sight so that the politicians in the audience could pretend they did not see it.

The bastards Bush

It’s easy to blame Trump, of course, because he’s so damn blame-able. But the worst justice on the damn court is Clarence Thomas, and he was appointed by George H. W. Bush, or Bush the First as no one calls him. Bush is now roundly praised by centrists as a man of integrity, etc. Justice Thomas is convincing evidence to the contrary. No other recent Republican president has appointed a more reactionary judge to lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court.

And then there’s Sam Alito, the no- so-smart as Scalia clone of Scalia. George W. Bush appointed him, so to those of you whose hearts are warmed by the sight of W. and Michelle Obama goofing about, all I can say to you is …. Iraq. And Alito. And Afghanistan. And …. Suffice to say, if it weren’t for these two losers (W. and H.W.), Roe would still stand.

All is not lost

Fortunately, there are things we can do. One of them is what so many thousands of people did over this past weekend – make your voices heard. Another is to push our Congress members to support legislation by Elizabeth Warren and other progressives that would support the right to abortion services through the establishment of federal clinics in red states, expansion of access to medication, and so on.

The other thing is, well, a million mutinies now. Vote for the most progressive members of Congress you can find. Encourage everyone around you to do the same thing. We need a progressive tidal wave this fall, and it’s going to take everyone doing that simple thing – voting. With a strong majority in Congress, we can pass and expanded Roe in to law, build a better healthcare system, expand the Supreme Court, impeach Kavanaugh, amend the constitution. All we need is the votes.

Impossible? I think not. If people mobilize, we can take over the works within the confines of the current system. With the right numbers, nothing could stop us. We just have to commit to doing it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The Whine That was heard ’round the world

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I just want to say, for the record, that Senator Lindsey Graham is a whiny little barnacle. The man has zero charisma, zero original ideas, and that’s why he attaches himself to the ample asses of men like Trump, McCain, you name it. Who’s next? I don’t know. Which right-wing garbage scow is likely to pass this way sometime soon?

In case you think I’m just going off on a random tirade, let me just say that I’m making this observation in reaction to the first days of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I shouldn’t single Graham out. The entire Republican side spent the day simpering about the unfairness of a process that has yielded them a 6 to 3 reactionary majority on the Supreme Court for the rest of any of our lives.

Playing to the freak mob

Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees are mostly just opportunities for political grandstanding. Senator Josh Hawley, for instance, is shoring up his Trumpist/Q-anon conspiracy theorist base, suggesting that Judge Jackson’s judicial record on cases involving child sex offenders is somehow troubling. The specific language he’s using is crafted to appeal directly to the Q crowd, who espouse a retread version of the blood libel. Democrats are pedophiles, he’s suggesting, and this judge is enabling them.

Hawley’s concern for the children moves me close to tears. I can think of one easy way he could have made a difference in the lives of literally millions of American children: support the child tax credit. Of course, he voted against it, along with all of his Republican colleagues. Democrats might want to remind people of this from time to time. They might also want to remind people of Hawley’s support for the insurrectionists who attacked the capitol January 6, 2021.

Ancient grievances

Now, I don’t want to suggest that there was a “good old days” when this sort of political grandstanding didn’t happen. There was maybe a bit more congeniality back in the 1990s and before, but these hearings were still a freak show. Back when Orrin Hatch was the ranking member and Strom Thurmond the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hatch opened every confirmation hearing with a long, drippy appreciation of Thurmond, a life-long confirmed segregationist shit-bum. No lie – I heard it at least twice.

The Republican’s evident resentment of Democrats on the committee stems back to the Bork hearings in 1987. Even then conservatives dominated the Court, and while Bork was turned down by the Senate, another conservative jurist, Anthony Kennedy, was confirmed instead. GOP senators at least affect to still be mad about Bork, about Thomas, and certainly about Kavanaugh, suggesting that Democrats are wild-eyed extremists attacking poor unsuspecting Republicans as they leave the office at the end of the day. Would that they were.

The humanitarian gambit

Russia’s murderous attack on Ukraine continues, as do the corporate media personalities who argue for America’s entry into the war. It is nothing less than this. They are now pushing the humanitarian intervention line – the one first used to blow things up in the Balkans in the 1990s, later trotted out for Iraq and Libya. Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe suggested to Biden’s pentagon spokesperson that not intervening might “make us look weak”.

They are using this to chip away at the administration’s resistance to direct military involvement in Ukraine. The left needs to be unified on this – no entry into this war, period. War with Russia is not an option, and hasn’t been for more than 75 years. We need to remind people of this simple, obvious fact – nuclear war means the end of organized human society, period. There is no justification for that level of risk to every living thing.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Making half of us second class citizens

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I heard a few moments of oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health while they were underway. I didn’t, however, get the chance to dig into it until about a week later, when Michael Moore ran the full audio feed on his podcast, Rumble. You can also read the transcript posted on the Supreme Court’s web site, if you prefer.

Either way you access it, it’s pretty ugly, but that’s not surprising. The fact is, we’ve been seeing this slow-motion train wreck coming for decades, and many, many of us chose to do nothing to stop it. But before I get into that familiar diatribe, I want to comment briefly on some of what was said during these oral arguments – specifically, a few reactionary hot takes as analyzed by someone who is not a Con Law expert.

Being neutral on a speeding train

If you listen to the entire proceedings, you will hear Justice Kavanaugh dive into a discussion of precedent. Kavanaugh cited cases like Brown v. Board of Education as fodder for his argument that sometimes it’s appropriate to overturn decisions that are wrongly decided. Legal experts have pointed out that most if not all of his examples were cases that expanded rights, whereas overturning Roe would take rights away from Americans. But he also contended that the court should be “scrupulously neutral” on the question of abortion because, he claims, the Constitution is neutral on abortion.

Kavanaugh affects to consider Plessy v. Furguson as wrongly decided – fair enough. But wasn’t Plessy effectively the court’s way of saying that they were neutral on “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws? After all, the majority wasn’t forcing all states to adopt these laws. If a state wanted to do so, it was up to them. In light of that, what was Plessy, then, if not “scrupulous neutralism”? How can he describe this kind of neutralism as being a positive thing?

Fetishizing enumerated rights

Both Justice Thomas and Justice Kavanaugh appeared to agree with Mississippi’s Solicitor General that abortion was not a right explicitly laid out in our 18th Century constitution. If they mean the word does not appear in the text, they are correct. However, it seems more than unreasonable to expect that the only human rights we should honor must be spelled out in our founding documents.

For instance, is there anything in the Constitution about a right to breathe? How about walking across the street – is that buried somewhere in Article II? Reactionary Supreme Court Justices play this little game all the time. Now, I’m not even just an old country lawyer, but I’ll say this much. It seems to me that what happens under your skin should be your own damn business. That strikes me as the closest thing to a natural right as anything I’ve ever heard.

Ladies choice, please

I have a suggestion for the Justices. Your honors, take this as you will. If you are considering a decision that will relegate women to second-class citizenship, it seems only fair that the decision should be made by those amongst you who are best situated to understand the full ramifications. I’m speaking of the women currently seated on the Court. Let’s let them decide how to move forward on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. You boys just wait in the cloak room until they work it out.

Hey – if you don’t have a uterus, you should have a say in this. Simple as that.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Making them pay.

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Mitch McConnell and the people he represents (i.e. not so much his Kentucky constituents as mega-donors across the nation) realized their decades-long dream this week – the seating of a sixth hyper-conservative Supreme Court justice who will very likely play an important role in rolling back labor rights, voting rights, the regulatory power of federal agencies, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and much more in the decades to come. Stick a fork in it: the Supreme Court is now locked down by reactionaries for the foreseeable future, thanks to the determination and ruthlessness of the Republicans and the lack of focus and passion on the part of Democrats. We had three major electoral opportunities to regain control of the Court since 2000, and we blew every one of them, and now we’ll have to deal with the consequences.

Readers of this blog and listeners to my podcast, Strange Sound, will know that I grew up in a white, suburban, solidly Republican town in upstate New York, and it will surprise no one to hear that many of my former high school classmates had cause to celebrate the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett this week. I have to say, though, what I saw instead was a shocking amount of whining on the part of my old Republican friends. Instead of high-fiving each other over the awesome news that any future progressive legislation will be knocked back by judicial fiat until kingdom come, they were screaming about the possibility that a new Democratic administration would “pack the courts”, do away with the filibuster, ruin the Senate as a “deliberative” body, etc. Seriously? These folks need to take a day off once in a while.

Of course, that is the source of their strength, in a certain respect. This is a movement fueled by aggrievement. The Republicans have never, ever forgiven the Democrats for failing to confirm Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork back in 1987, when they held the majority. They held a similar grudge over the hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas back in 1991. (Mind you, in both of these cases, the ultimate result was the seating of a tremendously conservative justice on the Supreme Court.) They fumed over George H.W. Bush’s loss in 1992, and subjected Clinton to eight solid years of investigation because of their resentment. This anger is part of what animates them, and I think we need to borrow some of this for our own movement. The Republicans must be made to pay a political price for this, not just in this election, but into perpetuity. We must turn the Garland nomination obstructionism and the Barrett confirmation into our equivalent of the right’s Bork obsession – painful losses that galvanize us to fight all the harder. Our politicians must remind the voters of these wrongs over and over and over.

Anger can be useful, if it’s channeled in the right way. After what happened this past week, I would think we on the left would be more than ready to turn up the heat under these fuckers, and make them pay. We shall see.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Old number 41.

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I don’t take joy in anyone’s passing, great or small. We’re all living beings with a limited time in this timeless universe, and there’s nothing to celebrate when death takes its toll, even when the departed is someone you are not at all fond of. I would have to count George H. W. Bush as someone who fits that description. Despite all of the glowing tributes from members of our political elite and millionaire media personalities, he was an awful president in a lot of ways – one that left a toxic legacy we’re still grappling with. The invasion of Panama alone was enough to wipe away any pretense of a “kind and gentle” leader, but the administration of Bush 41 went far beyond that atrocity.

Bush nice? Ask a Haitian. Ask an Iraqi.In listening to the hagiographic coverage put out by NPR, NBC and MSNBC, it’s clear that H. W, Bush’s conservative politics is a kind of “sweet spot” for our mainstream press – the ideal foil to the uncouth hair-hatted fiend who currently occupies the White House.  Like the McCain funeral, this is an opportunity to demonstrate their middle-of-the-road reactionary bona fides. It’s as if there’s Trump and then everyone else, and they take the side of the latter. The stupidity of the rhetoric is kind of sobering, though. On Morning Joe, Willie Geist was talking about how Bush 41 chose to join the Navy as an aviator, as if that was a singularly selfless act. The guy is so distant from the notion of conscription that he barely knows what he’s talking about. Note to Willie: Practically everybody ended up in uniform and shipped overseas in those days. Aside from a draft, there was enormous societal pressure to join up and do your part. Every military age male in my extended family at that time was sent to fight in World War II (one didn’t return, another committed suicide afterwards).  No shade on Bush 41 – he sacrificed during the war, but his experience was very, very common.

I won’t tick through George H. W. Bush’s record on Panama, on Haiti (supported the 1991 coup), on Iraq, on Central America (consummated the criminal terror war against Nicaragua), on the war on drugs, on AIDS policy (hands off), on Clarence Thomas, and so on. It’s been treated elsewhere in much greater detail by better writers than me. All I can say is that, while I’m sorry he’s dead, he was not a “kind and gentle” leader by any stretch of the imagination, and he played a central roll in getting us to the awful place we find our selves in now. While I was never a fan of Clinton, I was glad to see Bush go in 1993, and I’m still glad he never had that second term.

No secret why I wasn’t invited to the funeral. Again.

luv u,

jp