The Supremes

I love the Supreme Court. To be accurate, I love the idea of the Supreme Court. I think it was wise of our founding fathers to build into the checks and balances system a branch that can make decisions without having to worry about reelection. The Supreme Court functions (or should) as the protectorate of the Constitution, defending it against misreading by lower courts and law makers.

Currently, I am currently frightened by what is happening in the Supreme Court. Does this mean that I don't actually like the Supreme Court, that I only like it when it upholds my ideals? I don't think so. I have been reading some of the opinions that have been recently decided. It took me four days to finish reading the short opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (the "partial birth abortion" case because its treatment of women and prior abortion law was both ridiculous and infuriating.

I don't talk about politics too often, but I feel very strongly about this and I want other people my age to recognize the importance of this topic. I had an email exchange this week with my health law professor from BU, Leonard Glantz. Leonard deserves his own blog entry, but we'll get to that later. Leonard, as you will notice, is both outspoken and eloquent, even in a casual email, so I received his permission to post his thoughts on the Supreme Court:

"The right wing has really taken over. All the decisions from the past week are deeply disturbing. The scariest is the high school free speech case- Thomas (concurring) actually says the 1st amendment does not apply to HS students. I never saw anything like this. It also permits censorship based on what the principal thinks what the speech means- its actual meaning is irrelevant. Terrible. Makes me want to smack Ralph Nader in the face with each case that comes down."

I didn't get the Ralph Nader comment and asked for clarification.

" believe Nader is responsible for the election of Bush. He (and the nitwits who voted for him to “make a statement”) took essential votes away from Gore in key states. Nader’s argument was that it didn’t really matter who the president was because all the candidates are in corporate pockets, anyway. I guess he forgot about Supreme Court appointments. As far as I am concerned , this is Nader’s ultimate legacy.

One of the noteworthy things about this Court is how fractured it is. All the important cases were decided 5-4. This means that it is not only ideologically split but it has no real leadership.

When Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the chief justice was Earl Warren (who, by the way, was a California republican prosecutor appointed by Eisenhower). These were the days when quality and integrity mattered in court appointments and not solely one’s views on abortion and gay rights. Because of the sensitivity of the issue in Brown, probably the most revolutionary decision ever handed down by the Court, Warren insisted that the decision be unanimous so that all lower courts and legislatures would have clear guidance on where the Court stood on the issue of desegregation. It took some horse-trading and wording changes, and so forth, but Warren got the unanimous vote he knew was required to really make desegregation work.

The current decision [on using race in school placements] is a 4-1-4 decision with Kennedy being the decisive vote (how pathetic is that?) in any future litigation and no one having any idea what is permissible now and what isn’t. So it isn’t just the outcome of the decision that is troubling, it is what it indicates about the dysfunction of the court and the fact that the radicals are quite content to cause social chaos. There will now be scores of cases challenging all sorts of plans in schools across the country- it is hard to imagine how unleashed the right-wing will feel to attack school integration programs, and how much expense and disruption this will cause to already fragile school systems.

This court is also the most radical court one could imagine- it pays no attention to precedent even though Roberts and Alito swore in their hearings that precedent was so important and must be followed. There was no doubt at the time that they were simply lying when they said that (they were appointed because they are right wing radicals, not judicial moderates) but it is startling to see that they are entirely unembarrassed to be exposed as perjurers – an advantage of life-time appointments."


(The cartoonist here is Pat Bagley again.)