Saturday, October 18, 2014

A New Low Water Mark For Supreme Court Hypocrisy

The hypocrisy of the champions of free speech often hinges on them being enthusiastic about free speech when it's other people who have to pay a price.  In such instances as the ruling allowing the disruption of funerals by the Westborough cult, their alleged right to "speech" violates a right that any civilized person would recognize, the right to bury your dead unmolested by those unconnected to you.  And in the more recent case allowing harassment of those who work in and use womens health clinics, even a right to not be in danger of attack and murder is a price deemed acceptable for them to pay for the "free speech" of their potential attackers and killers.

Yet the free speech industry, the lawyers and legal organizations, the celebrities and academics, judges and, lest we leave them out, the corporate scribblers and babblers who couldn't have a more vested interest generally find those womens' rights a fitting price to pay on as much as a daily basis because, you know The First Amendment says "shall make no laws".   It's always so easy to assign someone else the cost of some other parties' "rights" in such cases, and something obviously hypocritical in those whose money is gained through selling words and images.

And that hypocrisy goes all the way to the top as this story from On The Media proves.   The Supreme Court not overturned a ban on protests on the plaza of the court, under a 1949 law, protecting itself from the speech of those who disagree with their decisions as alleged public servants, protecting them in a way that they refused to when it was a question of women seeking health care at clinics which have been the target of armed attack leading to deaths.   And they are doing it again, the Supreme Court, bringing a case to overturn a lower court ruling which would open the plaza to protests, a case which they not only bring but will hear. As Bob Garfield notes, the hypocrisy of the Supreme Court justices goes much farther than that and, in the anticipated refusal of the most interested court members to recurse themselves in hearing their own appeal of the case against a student holding a sign on their sacred plaza, that hypocrisy in their free speech absolutist rulings couldn't be more obvious.

One of the worst habits taught by the elite to their young is the sense of entitlement in which their interests and rights are granted an exemption from consistency and integrity and in the Supreme Court members, all of them trained in those institutions that formalize and inculcate that privilege as an official virtue, the inherent hypocrisy of that reaches both its most dangerous form and also the form which exposes the oligarchic charade emblematic of a late stage and decadent empire.

The extent to which Supreme Court justices were supposed to be governed by a sense of civic morality and a sense of honor was naively optimistic to start with. Almost from the beginning the members of the court displayed why that was the case.  Today that same naivety is inexcusable.   In the present day court's lack of honor and civic morality mixed with bald-faced favoring of the wealthy and privileged of their own class has become intolerable.  And they are even allowed to silence those who disapprove of what they do from reaching their sacred notice using the excuse that it might influence them.  Apparently seeing a sign which disagrees with them is more of a dangerous influence on their thinking that paling around with the corporate oligarchs whose cases come before their courts and the lawyers who bring those cases.   And, perhaps from their point of view, they are right.  In some improbable and rare instance they might see things from a vantage point which wouldn't favor their class and their intimate friends and associates.  They might lose a place in the hunting party next season.

The Congress is often accused of being the most corrupt of all the institutions of the federal government, jokes about that go back at least as far as Mark Twain designating them as our indigenous criminal class.  The present day Republican majority in the Congress would certainly earn them the title.   But I think it is actually those bodies which are more removed from the direct election by The People  who have been the source of far more corruption.   And there has not been a worse institution for that then The Supreme Court, the one which is entirely unelected and which has the privilege of exempting itself from the very laws it bends or creates for the rest of the country.  While I think the history of elected state courts proves that direct election of the highest court wouldn't likely improve things, making it illegal for them to exempt themselves from the laws and rules they force on the rest of us, with all of their included dangers and inconveniences, is necessary.  At the very least real laws governing mandatory recusal should be tried.  There are at least two or three sitting on the court who would have likely been forced out of office through their  most outrageous refusal to recuse themselves when there has been the most blatant and obvious conflict of interest.  Way too few of the justices have been removed for their actual and obvious malfeasance for anyone to have any confidence in the legitimacy of the body as it is now.

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