News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. June 28, 2019: Just when you think it cannot get any worse IT DOES …
Especially when it is the so-called Supreme Court of the United States.
They just produced their latest 5-4 OUTRAGE Thursday.
What they did most of all is PROVE we need a NEW kind of Supreme Court for right now, for the future, for forever. This one will NOT do.
So, what is their latest outrage that forced me this week to trash my original episode for this week and instead write about this court of MADNESS?
It is their decision Thursday 5-4 that state legislatures can abuse their power and our Constitution protections just as much as they wish.
The majority party in any and all state legislatures can draw any convoluted redistricting maps they can come up with to deny fair elections. How does the Right-Wing Supreme Court majority “justify” (sic) it ….?
The same way our so-called Supreme Court has issued abusive majority decisions throughout American history; by hiding behind the most absurd so called “doctrine” of all the original intent of the Founders.
TIME TO STOP this Con Game once and for all. It is an abomination and a denial of the very intent of the Founders to produce a Constitution that would withstand the test of time and be a model for generations to come.
Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does that document provide for any rigid inflexible form of government, let alone anywhere use the bogus term “original intent.” Use of that canard is nothing but an invitation to misuse our Constitution to mis-allow the Supreme Court to ignore the Constitution.
What this 5-4 decision does at more than any other in our time in our history, is make the future of the Supreme Court and the very meaning of the U.S. Constitution, a major issue in the upcoming 2020 Presidential election.
Any Democratic candidate who does not have a plan to REFORM – I mean RE-FORM the Supreme Court – does not deserve to be President.
The two key points here are: 1) U.S. Constitution does not mandate the number of Supreme Court Justices; nor 2) how long they can serve.
Those two facts allow Congress to remake the Supreme Court so it works for us.
Based on creating a Supreme Court in which Presidents nominate and the U.S. Senate confirms Supreme Court nominees who agree that ORIGNAL INTENT is a false premise with NO validity.
That the REAL and legitimate purpose of the Supreme Court is to admit: 1) it was impossible for the Founders to create document that would always be subject to one interpretation without taking into account the reality of the time in which it is being interpreted; 2): that there is nothing about the Founders or the document they wrote and which was ratified that did not allow it to evolve over time to both serve well the times in which it would exist in the future, and 3): a Constitution that also created a Supreme Court that could and would insure that any attempts to misuse the Constitution for ABUSIVE purposes would be corrected by the Supreme Court, and further,
4) That the very wording and structure of the U.S. Constitution provided for REFORM of the Supreme Court if it did not fulfill these functions.
We are at such a pivotal inflection point tight now right here!
This abusive decision today is the tipping point. The idea that we may have a Supreme Court for generations to come in which Justices serve for the rest of their lives that will repeatedly rule 5-4 or worse 6-3 or even 7-2 for years to come if Trump is re-elected to abuse their power and to destroy the Constitution and the rights of the people is UNACCEPTABLE.
Insulting both the Founders and all of us and generations to come, laughing in our faces with ruling after ruling in which they have the audacity to state they are making their decisions based on the so-called ORIGINAL INTENT of the Founders all of who have been dead for 200 years or more.
The fact is beyond dispute; if they were alive today and writing the U.S. Constitution today they would be writing and approving a very different document today, and in fact they included a Supreme Court in the Constitution that became our core document ….
So that the Supreme Court would be the ultimate body to ensure the Constitution was in fact interpreted in ways that made it a relevant document far, far into the future.
This abusive drawing of legislative maps in states is a PERFECT example. If the Founders had any idea that state legislatures would use their “power” to subvert the process of fair elections by drawing ever more convoluted election boundaries to ENSURE the minority party in any state would always control that state, the Founders would have specifically included a clause in the Constitution that election districts boundaries must be created after each census by an independent non-partisan commission to insure they did not subvert the very meaning of fair elections. The fact is that when the Constitution was written there was no such thing as political parties that might abuse the system in this way.
Again, the creation of the Supreme Court was to be our guarantee against the abuse of the Constitution instead it has become the ABUSER.
The time for CHANGE is now right now!
It must begin with the election of 2020 and serious Democratic candidates must call for RE-FORMING the Supreme Court as key campaign issue.
Lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court must END. 5-year terms in which justices then return to other duties as regular Federal Judges is what is needed.
In tandem, Congress must pass and the President sign, a resolution that states clearly the concept of “original intent” is not written into the U.S. Constitution. Rather that the U.S. Constitution is a ‘living document’ that serves its purpose as the Founders intended and it must be interpreted subject to the time and character of the times. And that further, the Supreme Court has an absolute mandate under the Constitution to insure fair and open elections.
Then each new nominee to the Supreme Court must pass the test of agreeing to the fact that they will rule according to these doctrines and that a 2/3 vote of both the Senate and House can remove any Justice from the Supreme Court while in no way penalizing their remaining as sitting Federal judges.
There is no perfect solution to the problem facing us in the past or as today as evinced by the 5-4 decision allowing blatant gerrymandering or all future abuses by a majority on the Court, but we can have a far better system.
The Founders inherently provided that opportunity by NOT specifying the details of how the Supreme Court would be constituted or operate. Thy left that in the hands of the Congress and the President to define by law.
NOW we need a President and Congress that will make these changes.
Nothing less will do and the time to do so is the 2020 elections.
(This series dedicated in honor of the late Liu Xiaobo & Jamal Khashoggi)
