The Great SCOTUS Scam
The Supreme Court has always been a problem. Apart from being an unelected body of lifetime appointees that can overrule the will of the people without any means of recourse, which institutionally shits right in the face of any notion that the United States is a democracy, it has always been a deeply conservative, pro-business, pro-wealth, and generally white supremacist organization. It may have gotten worse lately, but it’s not wildly out of character.
Despite the focus of the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of laws and generally self-serving interpretations thereof, the Constitution says very little about the Supreme Court itself, giving the court license to largely self-govern. If there were any kind of accountability or commitment to ethical standards on the court, that might be more acceptable, but as the court is, it is empowered to act as the legal arm of a dictatorship, not a democracy.
It is also a symbol of dictatorship, not democracy, when a one-term president, who twice lost the popular vote and only ever had the support of a deranged and brainwashed minority of the population, is able to install a third of the court and so exercise unjust and undemocratic control for decades to come.
The legal interpretations of the court’s extremist justices are so biased, self-serving, and often contradictory, they destroy any notion of respectability, fairness, and justice that the SCOTUS purports to represent. They gleefully and hypocritically rob other people of their rights while choosing to ignore the ways in which their interpretations would affect themselves. Thomas, for example, was happy to overturn Roe and steal the rights of women. He then expressed his eagerness to overturn decisions such as those protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ people. He has not, however, expressed a desire to overturn Loving v. Virginia, because that would affect him personally. He is not a woman or a gay or trans person, so he doesn’t give a shit what happens to them, but he is a Black man who does give a shit what would happen if states decided to outlaw his interracial marriage to his fascist coup-plotting white wife. The right to marry someone outside of one’s own race doesn’t appear in the Constitution any more than do the rights of gay people to do so, or for women to have the right of bodily autonomy. The Constitution ignores the rights of most people and much of reality.
Extremist justices like Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, the latter three of whom sit in stolen seats and had no right to be considered for court appointments, let alone given them, place undue, irrational, and often contradictory value on the original intention of the founders who drafted the Constitution. Any rational, intelligent person understands the idiocy of this philosophy. Unless one wants to return the country to a small, coastal, white supremacist, slave-owning, patriarchal oligarchy in which only wealthy white land-owning men had any real power or rights, which these extremist justices and those they serve do seem inclined to want, one cannot champion “originalism.” Not only were the original intentions of the founders largely out of step with the great majority of people today, they do not fit in a modern world context. They were men for whom much of the world was a mystery, the future was far beyond their imaginings, and who, in all their posturing and flowery language, sought only the ability to personally accrue wealth unencumbered.
Incidentally, originalists should know that the founders damn sure wouldn’t have expected, or allowed, a Black man or any women to serve in any government role, let alone the Supreme Court. They’d also raise their eyebrows, and probably their guns, at the number of Catholics on the bench.
Worst of all, the SCOTUS is dominated by a majority of justices, representing a small minority of people, who by their actions appear to be intent on the collapse of the union and the genocide of its people and all life on Earth. This is what they’ve signaled by their most recent decisions, including revoking the right to abortion by empowering stolen state legislatures to decide their own draconian abortion laws, promoting the right of any jackoff to openly roam public spaces with weapons of war by stripping other states’ rights to decide their own gun control laws, and gutting the powers of the EPA to regulate the poisons that polluting industries pump and dump into the environment. The Supreme Court is a dictatorial legal arm of the corporatist GOP which seeks to extract as much wealth as they can, while inflicting as much suffering, violence, destruction, and death as they can on the road to the collapse of the United States, the end of organized human society, and the eventual genocide of life on Earth.