Tag: – John Roberts

Posted on

A Trifecta Kind of Day — Maybe good things come in threes

A Trifecta Kind of Day

Maybe good things come in threes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 8th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There were three news stories today that were a refreshing change from the unrelievedly grim news out of such diverse places as the Ukraine, the Canadian North, and Florida.

In ascending order of importance:

Pat Robertson is dead, age 93. This hateful televangelist has been a stain on American discourse for decades, and frankly, I’m glad he’s dead. He had his professed opinion on the nature of the afterlife, and I believe that when you die you simply wink out of existence and revert to the state of being you had for the 14 billion years before you were born. Ironically, he may be lucky if it turns out I was the one who was right.

The second most important story was the federal indictments that the justice department will unseal Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. This is the documents case, and there are reports that they include willful obstruction of justice and violations of the espionage act. The indictments will come from a Florida Grand Jury whose existence was a very well-kept secret until next week. This means the trial will be in Florida, negating Trump’s planned howls that he couldn’t get a fair trial in Washington or New York. The back up plan of course was to pretend the indictments were political and partisan. A Faux News “journalist” wanted to know if there was a REASON this was all happening “in the middle of a presidential election campaign.” I’m told that the respondee was unable to keep a straight face. Propaganda has to have at least a kernel of plausibility among the True Believers, and that one won’t even reach that low bar. To me, it reveals the vacuous desperation of the Republican party. I think Trump will be pretty much reduced to arguing he was innocent of breaking law because he was accused of abusing powers he didn’t actually have.

The most important story was the Supreme Court ruling on Allen v Milligan. By a 5-4 majority, the court ruled that the redistricting in Alabama was a clear violation of section two of the Voting Rights Act and was discriminatory based on race.

That the redistricting was discriminatory was pretty much indisputable on the face of it, and instead, what Alabama was asking the SC to do was simply junk the law the action violated. This was a step too far for John Roberts, who wrote, “The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew. We find Alabama’s new approach to §2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our §2 case law as Alabama requests.” Brett Kavanaugh joined Roberts in crossing over to the Dark Side (“We have cookies!”).

Nobody thinks for an instant that these two puppets of the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues have had a change of heart and want to uphold Civil Rights in the US. They may have simply realized that the legitimacy of the Court, already in tatters, could collapse entirely with a second incendiary and highly unpopular ruling in the same year. At least they could hide behind stare decisis and explain to those holding their leashes that they had to pretend to uphold case law, at least for now. I don’t trust their motives, whatever they are. But they flat-out declared the redistricting done by the bigots of Alabama to be unconstitutional.

But the results in the short term are monumental. Alabama will have to redraw their districts well before the next election, and further, similar cases in Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia are now effectively decided. That means that four states with 73 electoral votes will have to hurriedly redistrict, and the resulting shifts should create about 20 black-majority districts that didn’t previously exist. While it may not affect the presidential race (all four states have a winner-takes-all for the president candidate with the most votes statewide) it will affect congressional races—up to 20 seats may change. Had these redistricting had been struck down in 2021, the Democrats would currently enjoy at least a 5 seat majority in the House.

And for now, at least, Section Two of the Voting Rights Act remains the law of the land. It’s an encouraging development at at time when the Supreme Court is normally in the vanguard of a fascist coup against the country.

Robertson dead. Trump indicted (some more, this time federal). The VRA still alive.

Yup. Good things come in threes.

Posted on

Sorry — Can’t Help You. Court decides states can quash constitutional rights

June 28th 2019

“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts…Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”

–– John Roberts, Majority ruling, RUCHO ET AL. v. COMMON CAUSE ET AL.

With those words, Chief Justice Roberts twisted a gerrymandering case to address the remit of federal review, not of voters’ rights, but the rights of political parties. It’s a ludicrous argument. Nobody is talking about the rights of political parties; the case is about the efforts of political parties (OK, the Republicans, 99% of the time) to undercut the rights of residents to fair and equitable representation in the Congress. Roberts is pretending that by negating Republican cheating that means the Court would be showing bias in favor of the Democrats.

Usually I use an analogy or metaphor at this point to highlight how ridiculous this is, but words fail me. I feel like I’ve fallen into a novel: Jonathan Swift, maybe, or Lewis Carroll. Franz Kafka? Joseph Heller?

A Court that wasn’t overburdened with fascist toadies would have simply asked the question: are the rights of voters to equal representation being upheld? That’s the only constitutional issue in play: the parties (OK, THE Party) has no rights. And it’s utterly insane to pretend that it’s unconstitutional to interfere with one party’s ability to cheat the voters and deprive them of their rights.

So: suppose some restaurant chain in the South decides to stop serving African-Americans. Don’t laugh; all you need to know to realize how plausible that is would be the fact that several states have passed draconian laws limiting and even banning abortion in hopes that Roberts and his merry band of fascists will strike down Roe v. Wade. If the mere prospect of support from the right wing of the Court is enough to drive the bible pounding no-choice authoritarians into an orgy of attacks on the rights and freedoms of women, what chance will African-Americans have?

/We’re back to the days of Jim Crow. They get sued, and it gets to the Supreme Court. Now, rather than arguing that they have the right to infringe on the right of African-Americans, they instead argue that Jim Crow is simply a better business model, and that the court would risk interfering with their right to compete on a level playing field with their competition.

The Roberts Court would ignore the rights of African Americans in such a case, just as it deliberately ignored the rights of voters in this case. Instead, they would grab evidence, no matter how flimsy, to make it an issue of interfering with fair competition between corporate members of the same service industry.

But it goes beyond that. Ever since they lost control of the Federal Government, the Republican Party have dreamed of States’ Rights. Originally (and to this day) it was the realization that industries could better control the states they dominated than they could the entire country. Extraction companies, then as now, pounded the need to end federal interferences with their profit margins and turn those public lands, such as Yosemite or Yellowstone, over to people who would know how to best make money off of them.

States’ Rights became especially important to Republicans after they used the Nixon Southern Doctrine to become the party of the South. Segregationists dreamed of the day they could Nullify Federal anti-discrimination laws. Big Church industries saw a path to authoritarian pseudo rule through state capitols.

Turning the United States into fifty little fiefdoms benefits authoritarians. It essentially destroys the rights of the people previously known as Americans. Some parts of the country, such as California or New York, would start out OK, but eventually find themselves in a race to the bottom against states that have no problem with slave or indentured labor, are contemptuous of environmental and health safeguards, and rule, rather than govern, meaning the serf class would have little leverage to improve wages or freedoms. It would be like waking up and finding that Vietnam or Burma have moved next door to your state, and your industry is competing with neighbors who don’t have minimum wage, can dump raw sewage in the river upstream from you, and constantly broadcast pseudo-religious propaganda at you.

This is the dream of Roberts and his party stooges.

They have control of the court, and they did it through the duplicity and hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell, and the confused but malign cooperation of Donald Trump, lackey to all authoritarians. In the House, Pelosi showed her centrist colors (white and yellow) once again by caving to Trump’s blackmail on the border.

If they aren’t driven from office, things won’t get better; they will get worse. Much worse.

Republicans have no use for democracy or freedom. They simply want to rule.

error

Enjoy Zepps Commentaries? Please spread the word :)