A Word of Caution.

How can the most powerful court in the most powerful country in the world be so intellectually corrupt?

Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and especially Scalia - shameless political stooges the lot of them.

While many Americans and wellwishers in other lands celebrate today's US Supreme Court decision effectively extending same sex marriage to every state without exception, it was nonetheless a 5-4, split decision.  A 5-4 split on an issue as plain as this.  That's worrisome.  A little more stacking of that bench with another Scalia or Thomas could theoretically reverse today's decision, perhaps on the pretence of states' rights - you know, the same guise used to launch the Civil War.

It's nice to think "there's no going back now" but that may be just whistling past the graveyard.  This is 21st century America, something the 'founding fathers' would probably find unrecognizable.  Jesus Christ on a Crutch, this is the country that has abandoned habeas corpus.  It is the Land of Liberty where today even its very own citizens can be swept up and imprisoned indefinitely with neither charge nor trial. It's the nation where the president has assumed the power to execute US citizens by drone strikes.  It is the land of Total Information Awareness where everyone is spied upon by both government and the commercial sector.  This is the land where democracy and the political process has been subordinated to the forces of market fundamentalism, neoliberalism and corporatism.

This is not a place where same sex equality before the law is secure on the strength of a 5-4 split decision.  Sorry.  Maybe with time and a major demographic shift, political, civil and human rights may be restored.  Maybe not.

The Rot in America's Supreme Court

It used to be the subject of low grumblings but now influential American voices are coming out to condemn the corruption of their country's highest court.  The two main culprits (there are others) are Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

An editorial in The New York Times eloquently sets out the problem and the damage it causes to American justice.

Justice Scalia, who is sometimes called “the Justice from the Tea Party,” met behind closed doors on Capitol Hill to talk about the Constitution with a group of representatives led by Representative Michele Bachmann of the House Tea Party Caucus.


Justice Thomas, confirming his scorn for concern about conflicts of interest and rules designed to help prevent them, acknowledged that he has failed to comply with the law for the past six years by not disclosing his wife’s income from conservative groups.


In Supreme Court opinions, they showed how their impatience for goals promoted in conservative politics is infecting their legal actions. They joined in an unusual dissent from a court decision not to take a case about the commerce clause that turned into polemic in favor of limited government. In an important privacy case, NASA v. Nelson, they insisted the court should settle a constitutional issue it didn’t need to.

Constitutional law is political. It results from choices about concerns of government that political philosophers ponder, like liberty and property. When the court deals with major issues of social policy, the law it shapes is the most inescapably political.

To buffer justices from the demands of everyday politics, however, they receive tenure for life. The framers of our Constitution envisioned law gaining authority apart from politics. They wanted justices to exercise their judgment independently — to be free from worrying about upsetting the powerful and certainly not to be cultivating powerful political interests.

A petition by Common Cause to the Justice Department questioned whether Justices Scalia and Thomas are doing the latter. It asked whether the court’s ruling a year ago in the Citizens United case, unleashing corporate money into politics, should be set aside because the justices took part in a political gathering of the conservative corporate money-raiser Charles Koch while the case was before the court.

The US Justice System Blinks on Life Sentences for Kids.

By the slimmest of majorities, 5-4, the US Supreme Court has turned all wobbly and ruled it's unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole unless somebody actually died. US courts can still give kids life but they have to leave open the possibility of parole maybe after 50 or 60-years or long after it really matters any more.

The case concerned a young Floridian who commited armed robberies at the age of 16 and 17. The Sunshine State likes banging up kids and boasts an impressive 70% of America's children imprisoned for life.

Chief Justice Roberts sided with Kennedy and what the New York Times describes as the court's "four liberal justices" to ban life without parole for kids. The four losers predictably included Alito, Thomas and Scalia. Thomas, in a remarkable burst of creativity, acutally said something, holding, ''I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of this court, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens.'' In other words, as far as Thomas is concerned, who cares what's constitutional when the Florida legislature has okayed life without parole for kids? With his way of thinking, he'd be a stable boy on a fine, Southern plantation or at least riding at the back of the bus.

US Supreme Court - Strip Searching Schoolkids Illegal

In an unexpected decision, the United States Supreme Court has ruled, 8-1, that the strip search of then 13-year old eighth grader, Savana Redding, by school officials looking for drugs was unconstitutional.

During argument, the eight male judges appeared to be highly skeptical about the degree of suffering this sort of search could cause a young girl. That skepticism somehow evaporated before the judgment was written.

The decision wasn't quite unanimous. Noted USSC lawn ornament, the ever-mute Clarence Thomas, showed yet again how abysmally out of touch with reality he truly is by ruling to dismiss Redding's appeal.

Redding was a grade school honour student. Another kid, caught with drugs, blamed it on Redding. School officials, with no cause beyond the one kid's story, ordered the young girl into a room where she was forced to disrobe. Redding's mother was not notified in advance.

The young girl was so traumatized that she dropped out of school. She has since returned and will enter college this fall. When she sued (thanks to the ACLU), the school board, backed up by the National School Boards Association, put up a furious defence.

In his dissenting judgment, the reliably doctrinaire Thomas complained that the 8-vote majority ruling, "grants judges sweeping authority to second-guess the measures that these officials take to maintain discipline in their schools and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge." I don't know why this guy even bothers showing up for hearings. When it comes to his vote, and the legal reasoning behind it, surely he can just phone it in.

The Sad State of America's Supreme Court

There was a time when American courts thought the American Consitution defended 13-year old girls against strip searches by overeager school officials. Then George w. Bush stacked his country's highest court with uber-right zealots. The result? Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate, says that's all going to change today:

After [yesterday's] argument, it's plain the court will overturn a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion finding a school's decision to strip-search a 13-year-old girl unconstitutional. That the school in question was looking for a prescription pill with the mind-altering force of a pair of Advil—and couldn't be bothered to call the child's mother first—hardly matters.

...even if you were never a 13-year-old girl yourself, if you have a daughter or niece, you might see the humiliation in pulling a middle-school honor student with no history of disciplinary problems out of class, based on an uncorroborated tip that she was handing out prescription ibuprofen. You might think it traumatic that she was forced to strip down to her underclothes and pull her bra and underwear out and shake them in front of two female school employees. No drugs were found. But even those justices lacking a daughter, a niece, or a uterus had access to an amicus brief in this case documenting the fact that student strip searches "can result in serious emotional damage" and that student victims of strip searches "often cannot concentrate in school, and, in many cases, transfer or even drop out." Savana Redding, herself a data point, described the search as "the most humiliating experience" of her life. Then she dropped out of school. And five years later, at age 19, she gets to listen in on oral argument in Porky's 3: The Supreme Court Says "Panties."

...in recent years, the high court has slowly chipped away at the privacy rights of students—frequently based on the rationale that there were drugs!!! Somewhere in America!!! Drugs!!! Creating danger!!! (This led an annoyed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to dissent in a recent case that the court was peddling "nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock run amok, and colliding tubas" to justify drug tests for any student with a pulse. )

Ah, bless Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas wiping their jackboots on America's consitution at every opportunity, Barack Obama needs to take back the keys to what's become America's Supreme Court clown car.

http://www.slate.com/id/2216608?nav=wp