Supreme Court Failures
To The Editor:
In his Feb. 4 letter to the Record regarding the selection of Supreme Court nominees, Mr. Carpenter of Schulenburg failed to disclose the single greatest threat to our Constitution’s representational democracy caused by the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and that is the 5–4 Republican Justices SCOTUS ruling in Citizens United amending our Constitution by judicial activism in direct contravention of our Founding Fathers’ rightful fear of corporations. That Republican Justices ruling in Citizens United made infinite life corporations, both foreign and domestic, the equivalent of living but finite human beings and made their unlimited corporate money “free political speech.” Because of that Republican Justice’s ruling, we now have a country where the money of corporations is secretly spent in unlimited amounts to deceive voters and make incumbent lawmakers cower to corporate demands not in the interest of working families or of genuinely small business owners or of the very life of our planet. The present-day Republican
The present-day Republican controlled SCOTUS recently allowed computerized gerrymandering by corporate influenced state legislatures thereby empowering a minority of voters (typically voters who rely on Fox Cable News Talking Heads or its clones as their sole source of political information) in a state to elect a majority of their state and federal lawmakers. Those Republican Justices chose to ignore our country’s once enduring respect for the concept of “one person, one vote” that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg challenged them to remember and that they chose to ignore. In fact, the Republican Chief Justice, a Republican appointee and former corporate lawyer, at a forum at Rice University not too many years after his deciding tie-breaking vote in Citizens United, ironically shared that his most cherished words in our Constitution were “We, the People” despite the fact that his deciding vote enabled our government to be practically dominated by “We, the Corporations!”
Most GOP passed state legislation in Texas is now for the benefit of corporations created by legal fiction and not for the benefit of human beings created by God. Now, due to the unlimited “dark money” of corporations in political campaigns, our Republican state lawmakers treat corporations as their constituents and not working families and truly small business owners by such actions as repeatedly pirating the precious right of “local rule” from cities and school districts for the treasure chests of corporations especially in terms of clean air and water and public health. Americans should be rising up en masse to amend our Constitution to repeal Citizens United and ban computerized political gerrymandering by joining such grass roots movements as Move to Amend and by supporting progressive Democrats genuinely seeking to eliminate corporate money in politics. Finding a Republican lawmaker in our country who seeks the repeal of Citizens United is scarcer than hen’s teeth.
Sadly, that is unlikely until there is effective regime change at the voting booth and in overwhelming numbers given GOP voter suppression, because for decades now Republican lawmakers have sought to limit the amount of tax dollars invested in the education of our children and to limit the understanding of our children as to how our Constitution’s representational democracy should work for the common good as envisioned by our Founding Fathers. Not only are these kinds of in-depth learning experiences about our Constitution’s Bill of Rights and representational democracy and the nature of the present threats to our representational democracy practically banned by the GOP but now Republican lawmakers are trying to ban disclosure of all aspects of our country’s history to our children (e.g. failing to disclose and learn from such disclosures that the Vietnam War and the Iraqi War II were unjust wars wrongfully wasting American and other lives and money that should have been invested in our children’s future instead.)
Today, Republican lawmakers at both the state and federal level for the benefit of their corporate constituents, whose “dark money” is so vital to their election, have not only severely diminished the value of “one person, one vote” by political gerrymandering but also by making it needlessly difficult for students and working people and the elderly to register to vote and to vote in elections.
Yes, Mr. Carpenter, your “court of ideologues” has transformed self-government into a tyranny but that court is both a Republican appointed Supreme Court and a Republican controlled Supreme Court and that tyranny is not, as you concluded, of “woke-ism” but a tyranny of corporate fascism seeking to gain complete control of the American people.
John W. Mikus
Fayetteville