Written by Robert L Vogel   

Don't ever claim that Republican Supreme Court judges are not activists. Selecting Bush President resulted in two wars at a cost estimated at $4 trillion accompanied by tax breaks for the wealthiest, a full-scale assault on civil liberties, an invasive, ineffective 'homeland security' bureaucracy, criminal acts including torture, rendition, warrentless wiretapping, secret government, and an agenda that will make us a fascist, militarized empire. In selecting Bush, the Court assured the wreck of our republic. His legacy lives on in the Supreme Court.

The Court has sided with corporate interests consistently for a long time: In its 'wisdom', It decided that corporations are people, some with religious beliefs, whose only motive is profit, and that money is speech. The Citizens United and McKutcheon rulings will complete our transition to an oligarchy. Elections clearly are for sale now.

A corporate person, motivated only by profit, is a sociopath. He doesn't care if the planet is destroyed by his pollution. He has no loyalty to community. He is no patriot for he has no binds of citizenship and will move to the lowest wage, least regulated country, avoid all taxes by keeping profits offshore, and will buy as many politicians as necessary to mold policy in his favor. Corporations have set us on a (geologically) fast path to destruction. Maybe that's why the police are being militarized.

Republicans allowed lobbyists to draft legislation for monopoly industries and they created ALEC. This policy has led to massive redistribution of income, restructuring of the economy, corrupt politics, extreme income inequality, and an economy that is unfair, unjust. unstable, and unsustainable. Corporations are prospering.

Federal Judge Richard George Kopf wrote:

"In the Hobby Lobby cases, five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a “person” entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate because that corporation was “closely held” by family members. To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse. To most people, the decision looks stupid ’cause corporations are not persons, all the legal mumbo jumbo notwithstanding. The decision looks misogynist because the majority were all men. It looks partisan because all were appointed by a Republican. The decision looks religiously motivated because each member of the majority belongs to the Catholic church, and that religious organization is opposed to contraception. While “looks” don’t matter to the logic of the law (and I am not saying the Justices are actually motivated by such things), all of us know from experience that appearances matter to the public’s acceptance of the law."

A National Journal article last week about the Religious Right quoted far-right activist Richard Land about the Right’s aggressive decades-long effort to change the makeup of the federal judiciary. “Alito and Roberts are the gifts that keep on giving, and we would have gotten neither one of those without our involvement,” Land said, predicting that Roe v. Wade will soon be “thrown onto the ash heap of history.”


In its 2012-2013 term The Court ruled against journalists and other civil liberties advocates who tried to oppose surveillance. The all-Republican majority ruled that the plaintiffs have no right to litigate because they could not prove that the secret techniques harmed them. Thus they destroyed Americans privacy rights. Universal surveillance will make Orwell's vision look tame.

We have the world's largest military policing the empire, the largest prison population, rotting infrastructure, the worst income disparity, financially devastating education, weak social programs, and universal surveillance. All of the economic gains for the last three decades have gone to the very top.

The Court has committed a treasonous crime in its complicity in taking the US government from the people and giving it to corporations. A country run by corporations is, by definition, fascist. Glenn Greenwald in his book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, points out that the law no longer applies for the elite, but is harsh for everyone else.

we should:

* Pass legislation that the Supreme Court must adhere to the same ethical standards as the lower Courts.
* Amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United.
* Increase the number of judges on the Supreme Court because the Court is divided in such a way that a single individual can make many of the decisions. More judges on the Court, as most other countries have, would make for better decisions. FDR attempted this, and he should have succeeded.
* Nullify the Court's right of review. James McGregor Burns wrote: "John Marshall was wrong: it is emphatically the province and duty of the American people, not of the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court, to say what the Constitution is. A national reappraisal of the all-powerful court chosen by judicial roulette is crucial if American democracy is to meet the rising challenges of the twenty-first century." (From the last page of Burns' Packing the Court.)

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