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The US Supreme Court By It’s Own Actions Makes Itself Illegitimate…

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An old Jamaican is say­ing, ‘If you dress up a pig and put it in a church, the pig does­n’t become a Christian; the church becomes a pig­pen.’ Shout out to our depart­ed ances­tors who had the wis­dom to leave us these nuggets.
These days there is much con­ver­sa­tion about the legit­i­ma­cy of insti­tu­tions that were long held to be sacro­sanct. We are taught to respect these insti­tu­tions because they are sacred edi­fices of Democratic governance.
Truth be told, as a per­son who believes in the rule of law, I fun­da­men­tal­ly side with insti­tu­tions. I guess I could live with the label of institutionalist.
The unfor­tu­nate down­side to insti­tu­tion­al­ist ideals is that insti­tu­tions are cre­at­ed and pop­u­lat­ed with imper­fect men. It fol­lows, there­fore, that since the cre­ators of our insti­tu­tions were imper­fect, and the peo­ple who run them are even more so, it becomes dif­fi­cult to expect feal­ty to our insti­tu­tions when they con­tin­ue to show us they should not be trust­ed to do what’s right.

THE SUPREME COURT

Members of the nation’s high­est court are appoint­ed by men and women who are far from per­fect and are con­firmed by peo­ple with equal­ly less char­ac­ter. The process of advice and con­sent is a far­ci­cal pro­ce­dure used by sen­a­tors to pon­tif­i­cate and blovi­ate along polit­i­cal lines while the judges seek­ing con­fir­ma­tion lie through their teeth and are con­firmed. Others are allowed pro­mo­tions to high­er courts.
Ten times ten is always going to be one hun­dred, but if you got to the tens incor­rect­ly, the final out­come may add up, but how you got there is fun­da­men­tal­ly incorrect.
In sim­ple terms, there has been much hand­wring­ing about the US supreme court and whether or not it is ille­git­i­mate. I have offered my own opin­ion on this mat­ter in dif­fer­ent forums. Sufficient to say that the process of a sit­ting pres­i­dent appoint­ing jus­tices to the court and they are vot­ed up or down by the Senate is the standard.


When one side decides to thwart that process as Mitch McConnell did with President Barack Obama’s choice of now Attorney General Merrick Garland because they had the num­bers in the Senate, is a rea­son that the high court has no legitimacy.
To then add three Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amey Coney-Barrett, three Trump appointees to the court, Barrett just weeks before Trump left office, degrades the legit­i­ma­cy of the court in more than half of the nation.
It is no won­der a Marist Institute for Public Opinion poll found that 62 per­cent of Americans say they do have much con­fi­dence in the court.
The Supreme Court’s 1859 deci­sion in Dred Scott v. SanfordIn arguably the worst deci­sion ever, the Supreme Court ruled that black peo­ple were not enti­tled to the same right of cit­i­zen­ship as white peo­ple. After Dred Scott, a for­mer slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and free ter­ri­to­ry of Wisconsin, had moved back to the slave state of Missouri, it was found that he should be returned to slav­ery. Scott appealed to the Supreme Court seek­ing his free­dom. The court ruled against Scott and also ruled that the 1820 Missouri Compromise was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, mak­ing slav­ery con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly per­mit­ted through­out the entire coun­try and its territories.

The Supreme Court’s 1896 deci­sion in Plessy v. Ferguson  This rul­ing upheld sep­a­rate but equal and estab­lished “apartheid” as the law of the land. The rul­ing would stand until over­turned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and its descen­dant Jim Crow would remain the de fac­to law of the South until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Plessy was a bi-racial man who refused to move from a “blacks-only” rail­way car in Louisiana. The Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act did not con­tra­dict the equal pro­tec­tion clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court declared that the Constitution guar­an­teed legal but not social equal­i­ty. Although the opin­ion itself does not con­tain the lan­guage “sep­a­rate but equal,” legal seg­re­ga­tion was the de fac­to effect.
Judge John Marshall Harlan was the sole dis­sent­ing vote. In his dis­sent­ing opin­ion Harlan wrote “Our Constitution is col­or­blind, and nei­ther knows nor tol­er­ates class­es among cit­i­zens.” Plessey’s civ­il dis­obe­di­ence was a for­bear­er of the tac­tics immor­tal­ized by the civ­il rights move­ment of the 1950’s and 1960’s includ­ing the his­tor­i­cal and leg­endary Montgomery Bus boy­cott when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.

The Supreme Court’s 1883 deci­sion in Pace v. Alabama, In Alabama, inter­ra­cial mar­riage was a crime pun­ish­able by two to sev­en years of hard labor in a state pen­i­ten­tiary. Tony Pace, a black man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, chal­lenged the law. The Supreme Court ruled that the law was con­sti­tu­tion­al because it was “race-neu­tral” and there­fore did not vio­late the Fourteenth Amendment. The rul­ing was final­ly over­turned in Loving v. Virginia (1967).
The Supreme Court’s 1944 deci­sion in, Korematsu v. United States, the rul­ing deter­mined that Japanese intern­ment dur­ing World War II was con­sti­tu­tion­al. Chief Justice Hugo Black wrote that the need to pro­tect American from espi­onage out­weighed the indi­vid­ual rights of Fred Korematsu and the civ­il rights of all Americans of Japanese descent.
The Court refused to address all the oth­er civ­il rights vio­la­tions that marked the intern­ment of Japanese Americans dur­ing World War II. Korematsu also lost a lat­er rul­ing that estab­lished that indi­vid­ual rights are not absolute and could be sus­pend­ed dur­ing wartime.
The Supreme Court case is poignant reminder to any­one that is not con­cerned with the extent to which the last two admin­is­tra­tions have become to scale back on civ­il lib­er­ties as a reac­tion to the war on ter­ror­ism. The Authorization for Use of Military Force grants the pres­i­dent the right to use all “nec­es­sary and appro­pri­ate force” against any per­son or coun­try that was involved with the attack on September 11, 2001, includ­ing American cit­i­zens. The National Defense Authorization Act allows the mil­i­tary to detain United States cit­i­zens indef­i­nite­ly with­out charge or tri­al for mere sus­pi­cions of ties to ter­ror­ism. The Patriot Act allows for war­rant­less wire­tap­ping and elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The Supreme Court’s 1986 deci­sion in Bowers v. Hardwick,Bowers issued a rul­ing that sex between gay and les­bian part­ners was a crime. The court actu­al­ly nar­rowed a Georgia sodomy law that found all oral and anal sex to be ille­gal. All sodomy laws were even­tu­al­ly inval­i­dat­ed by the Supreme Court deci­sion in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).The rul­ing was made at a time when the court was deeply homo­pho­bic and con­cerned with rul­ings on pri­va­cy mat­ters. Legislating moral­i­ty from the bench, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote “to hold that the act of homo­sex­u­al sodomy is some­how pro­tect­ed as a fun­da­men­tal right would be to cast aside mil­len­nia of moral teaching.”
The Supreme Court’s 1978 deci­sion in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation,This rul­ing gave the FCC reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty over free speech over broad­cast media. The case estab­lished that cer­tain words, famous­ly George Carlin’s Seven Filthy Words, were not suit­able for tele­vi­sion. The court held that although the words were not obscene they were inde­cent. And sub­ject to restric­tion. The orig­i­nal sev­en words includ­ed “s*it, p*ss, f*ck, c*nt, a*s, b*tch, and tits”, but dur­ing his com­e­dy rou­tine, Carlin would also include “c*cksucker, motherf*cker, turd, fart, and tw*t.” Since then some of the words, i.e., b*tch, tits, turd, fart and a*s, have pret­ty much come off the list but the rul­ing is still in effect. The rul­ing of course does not apply to sub­scrip­tion-based, non-broad­cast media e.g. cable TV and satel­lite radio.
As the Supreme Court comes under the spot­light, with the report­ed Perks Clarence Thomas receiv­ing perks and the wife of John Robert’s entan­gle­ments, the real ques­tion remains how legit­i­mate is this court/
This is the body that over­turned parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2016 in the befud­dling deci­sion in Shelby County, Alabama Vs Holder. This rul­ing opened the door for mas­sive vot­er sup­pres­sion laws that have been passed all across the Republican-run States.
This Court upheld Citizens United allow­ing a flood of dark mon­ey into American Elections.
This Supreme Court over­turned 49 years of prece­dent on prece­dent in the Dobbs deci­sion, effec­tive­ly end­ing Rove Versus Wade.
John Roberts believes that the idea of sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers enables the court to do as it pleas­es and that the peo­ple’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Congress should have no over­sight or say-so in how the jus­tices operate.
If John Roberts is cor­rect in his and the oth­er eight (8) jus­tices’ asser­tion, then the Republic is effec­tive­ly ruled by eight robed kings and queens who have clear­ly decid­ed they answer to no one.
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.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.