The Great American Experiment in Democracy Fail

 

The Great American Experiment in Democracy

“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion… Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

Samuel Alito writing the Supreme Court majority opinion in Dobbs, State Health Officer of The Mississippi Department of Health, et al. vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization et al., June 24, 2022

That Trump’s three appointees to the Court stated in their confirmation hearings that Roe vs Wade was settled law that they would respect, vaporized. In a series of cases, beginning in 2008 with Heller vs District of Columbia, right wing judges have serially eroded or repealed the First (free speech and separation of church and state), Second (organized militia and the related right to bear arms), Fifth (right against self-incrimination/ due process) and Sixth (right to counsel), Fourteenth (extending the Bill of Rights to the States) and Fifteenth (protecting then emancipated African Americans’ voting rights) Amendments.

Heller was the first case in American history that determined that the Second Amendment imbued a ubiquitous and universal right to bear arms. Ignoring the “well regulated militia” language of the Second Amendment, and misciting what was perceived to be the relevant British gun laws in existence in 1789 (when the Bill was passed), Justice Antonin Scalia somehow discovered that “right.” Our Founding Fathers, living in a time of flintlocks and muskets, recognized no such right! If that weren’t a sufficiently erosive interpretation of the Second Amendment, the day before the reversal of Roe vs Wade, the US Supreme Court also issued a radical right-wing activist decision (written by Clarence Thomas) in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. vs Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, effectively challenging New York’s restrictions on individuals’ carrying concealed guns. Bang, you’re dead.

The First Amendment has drawn its share of 6-3 right-wing rulings, starting last July in challenging a California statute that required donor disclosure in support of political issues, in this case a religious non-profit related to its advocacy for contentious issues like religious rights, immigration and abortion. Citing a “chilling effect” on such religious activities, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion that the statute was unconstitutional in Americans for Prosperity Foundation vs. Bonta, Attorney General of California. Roberts led the 6-3 Court again on June 21st in Carson v. Makin, holding that once a state allows any government support for private schools, it cannot disqualify a faith based private school from receiving such aid. Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build.” The separation of church and state appears to be doomed under the current activist court.

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as amended in 2008) took a hit in 2013 under a conservative 5-4 majority opinion, again by Chief Justice Roberts, in Shelby County vs Holder, which vitiated restrictions on states that had imposed discriminatory voting restrictions. Immediately after that ruling red states exploded with a flurry of new discriminatory voting restrictions, many of which were rejected by lower federal courts… and many were not. On July 23rd, a 6-3 conservative supermajority, in Vega vs Tekoh, ruled that police officers could not face civil liability for failing to issue Miranda warnings during an arrest, undercutting the Fifth/Sixth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and right to counsel.

I have written extensively about Roe vs Wade in past blogs, but the full and formal reversal of that precedent occurred on June 24th in the above-cited ruling, Dobbs vs Jackson. Rejecting a notion of privacy and equal protection of women under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, Justice Alito, writing for that 6-3 supermajority (in which Roberts concurred) activist right-wing radical majority simply ignored a widely accepted 49-year-old as if it had never existing. Instantly, under “trigger laws,” 13 state statutes effectively banned abortions or made them practically impossible. A total of 26 states are falling in line with anti-abortion laws. Some are attempting ban even “morning after” pills and assessing applying criminal liability to out-of-state medical facilities performing the operation on their residents, which most lawyers believe is not permitted under the Constitution.

However, the Constitution and precedents from the Court interpreting that esteemed document seem to be nothing more than an inconvenient barrier to a radical court quite willing to make its own laws, even as they defy the majority of American opinions to the contrary. In flagrant allegiance to superseding mandates from the National Rifle Association and a clear minority evangelical belief system, we need no longer look to the Constitution of the United States for precedents anymore. A rogue Court has decided that where gun “rights” and evangelical beliefs conflict with the Constitution, the Constitution no longer applies.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if an attempted coup d’état from a defeated ex-president isn’t enough for you, perhaps his appointments to the US Supreme Court in our newfound autocratic governance by a distinct minority might not bother you either.