Writing Life

I’m still pretty upset by the narrow-minded and short-sighted decision by five of the nine Supreme Court justices yesterday in the DC gun ban case. I was going to write a ranting post, then decided I was too pissed off and would just let other’s write about it. Then I read a poignant op-ed from E.J. Dionne in today’s Washington Post. He pretty much summed up my feelings, especially with this excerpt:

Conservative justices claim that they defer to local authority. Not in this case. They insist that political questions should be decided by elected officials. Not in this case. They argue that they pay careful attention to the precise words of the Constitution. Not in this case.

As many have heard, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas published a memoir on Monday. It’s been all the rage, since it’s full of rage, Mr. Thomas’s to be precise. He rails against liberals, Yale, Senator Joe Biden and other groups that opposed his nomination. He compares anyone who stood against him to the KKK, even implying that they were worse than that. With no more detail than during his confirmation hearing, he yet again dismisses the charges raised by his former employee, Anita Hill.

The New York Times editorial board has raised an important question. Can this Justice, who harbors such hatred for any idea that he disagrees with and any person who dares question him, rule impartially when those ideas or those individuals appear before the Court?

Thumbing their noses at real race issues in the U.S., the Supreme Court rejected public school integration, an effort that take race into consideration in order to build diversity, strengthen communities and create learning opportunities in our schools. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This simplistic statement is not befitting someone who is so educated and rules the highest court in the land. Upper-class white privileged individuals never see race problems, either through studied inattention or racism framed in an imaginary level playing field thesis.

The dissenting opinions from Steven Breyer and John Paul Stevens are worth reading. Click on the above link to go to excepts and full links from the Think Progress piece. The Bush Administration has put two justices on the bench who are chipping away at individual and group rights, in favor of executive power and corporate greed.

Low-lights from today:

• Supreme Court restricts free (though granted stooopid) speech rights of students in latest ruling. The kicker (hat tip to DailyKos) is what Thomas wrote in this 5-4 opinion. As one would expect, Thomas sided with the dark side and seemed to want to eliminate all rights of students to any form of speech. He wrote “In short, in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power of ideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order.” Wow, maybe it really is the Spanish Inquisition. And you wonder why Thomas and other far-right out-of-the-mainstream Supremos believe that torture is fine and dandy.
• CNN and Larry King dropped an interview scheduled with Michael Moore in order to squeeze celebrity prisoner Paris Hilton in on Wednedsay. Controversial director Moore, of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame, is releasing his newest film, Sicko, which is a scathing analysis of the state of health care in the U.S. I guess CNN and Larry King prefer gossip to actual news that at its very core affects the health of Americans. One would think that multi-bypass King would want to cover the health care industry.
• Americans have a horrible sense of history and contemporary events, according to this recent Newsweek piece. Take a look at the list of questions they used, although the answer is already there. Must be prepping for a No Child Left Behind test.

Duck and cover, baby.

For your excellent oral dissents to this ultra-conservative Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion last month and on gender pay discrimination just this Tuesday. Standing up for the rights of women that have been hard won over decades is so important under the seemingly misogynistic condescension of five robbed men. See this NY Times piece for more information.

The right wing fanatics have started carving up women’s rights. Today’s Supreme Court decision supporting the Republican partial birth abortion ban law from 2003 flies in the face of U.S. law, appelate court rulings and previous Supreme Court precedent. As Bush wedged his far-right justices onto the bench, they paid homage to stare decisis, which says that settled law is just that, settled. But, once they get their hands on their right-wing meat issues, they throw off the cloak of impartiality and drool with the power they have to upend settled law to suit it to their backward, male-centered, woman-backgrounded worldview.

In the minority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that upholding the ban “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives.”

On Capitol Hill, Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA 06) warned that it was “a frightening and dangerous step towards criminalizing the very constitutional freedoms that previous courts have upheld for generations.” Floundering presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) jumped on the decision as a good thing, trying anything now to resuscitate his clinically-dead campaign. Other Republican presidential candidates also rejoiced that over 50% of America’s population had their rights constrained today.

(Thanks to RawStory for providing the Ginsburg and Woolsey quotes.)

After attending the Eric Massa fundraiser, I walked back past the Capitol and the Supreme Court. I snapped this photo with my cell phone camera. It was really pretty cool, with most of the lights still on in the front windows and the relative quiet and calm on the street. I snapped two pics of the Capitol itself but they didn’t turn out as nice.

From a Reuters wire report today:

Marble chunk falls from top of Supreme Court

November 28, 2005



A chunk of marble fell from near the roof of the U.S. Supreme Court onto the stairs in the front of the building but no one was injured, a court spokeswoman said on Monday.

Spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said a piece marble about one-foot square, from what was thought to be dentil molding at the top of the building, fell about 9:30 a.m. (1430 GMT). There was no one on the stairs at the time, a half hour before the opening of the court’s session.

The marble was above the inscription near the top of the building saying, “Equal Justice Under Law” and above the allegorical figure representing “Order,” one of nine sculptured figures on the pediment.

She had no explanation why it fell, but said it was not related to the construction work occurring as part of the renovation of the building. She said no work is currently taking place on the front the building, which faces the U.S. Capitol.

The original construction on the front of the building took place about 70 years ago.

I wanted to briefly write about an AP piece today that discussed how Bush can reshape the Supreme Court as a conservative bastion. The article quoted Leonard Leo, the executive VP of the shadowy Federalist Society. You know this group, they support very conservative ideologues but no one seems to claim membership in the group. Hordes of Republicans have spoken to the group, and were warmly received, yet the speakers claim to not even know anything about the organization.

From the article:

The tendency to pigeonhole nominees according to their suspected political ideology is inappropriate, said Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society.

“Judicial selection is not about some optimal `ideological balance’ on the court,” he says. “The chairs at the bench at the Supreme Court are not marked `liberal,’ `moderate’ and `conservative.’ The job is to find the best qualified individual ? man, woman, or minority ? who understands the proper judicial role.”

This just speaks volumes about this group. Note how he says: “man, woman, or minority.” Are minorities not men and women? Who are these strange beings? Might they even be people? Or, maybe we can ask the Constitutional Fundamentalists. Those are the people who say the US Constitution isn’t a living document, but needs to be interpreted strictly as it was written in the late 18th Century. Well, slaves were legal then and only counted for 3/5 of a person (Reference: US Constitution, Article I, Section 2, Clause 2). So, maybe that’s what these minorities are.

Also, look at the invisible markers. Man and woman don’t have any adjectives before them, but it’s implied that he means “white”. During a time when claims of racism and classism are being raised with respect to the Hurricane Katrina response, it’s telling that America’s conservatives still speak in such coded terms.