The Supreme Court ought to be protecting democracy.
As Americans United for Separation of cult and
State has said of the SCOTUS ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, “This is a
dark day for true religious freedom in America,” and the ACLU is
certainly correct when it warns, “Today’s Supreme Court ruling gives
some companies the ability to use religion as a license to
discriminate.” In the words of People for the American Way: “The Supreme
Court just ruled 5-4 that CORPORATIONS have a ‘religious’ right to
discriminate against their employees.”
President Obama made clear where he stands: with
American women in the 21st century, rather than with religious wingnuts in the 13th. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday
that, “Today’s decision jeopardizes the health of women that are
employed by these companies. We believe that a company should not be
able to assert their views to deny employees federally mandated
coverage.”
The consequences are potentially devastating for Americans:
The repugicans have taken heart and are rallying once more to the cry that Obamacare itself is a failure:
Democrats are justifiably outraged. So, unsurprisingly, are those most affected by this decision: women.
And women have a right to be outraged. The decision to give
corporations more rights than women was made by five men who will not be
affected by their own decision.
“A stifling decision for American women,” said Debbie Wasserman Schultz
(D-FL). “It’s a decision that blocks women from being able to make
their own healthcare decisions. Not just reproductive healthcare
decisions, but healthcare decisions in general.”
Unsurprisingly, public confidence in the Supreme Court is at an all time low, according to Gallup (not that any branch of government is faring well at the moment).
You think you’re shocked? Imagine how poor Rip Van
Winkle would feel to wake up and find out that corporations are more
fully realized human beings than he is himself.
The Founding Fathers, in 1787, gave us the secular
United States Constitution, a carefully crafted document that
established a system of government new to the world, the modern liberal
democracy. In so doing, they rejected the Old World paradigm that power
derives from the divine right of kings or from god directly,
establishing instead the principal that political power derives from the
consent of the governed – not to put too fine a point upon it – the
people.
In their wisdom, they banned the establishment of
state religion and religious tests for public office, thus ensuring
(they hoped) that, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, writing in his
autobiography of the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, “to comprehend,
within the mantle of its protection, the jew and the gentile, the christian and mohammedan, the hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”
That is what Religious Freedom meant to the Founding
Fathers. Actual Freedom for all religions. Not freedom for one religion
to persecute all others.
They never expected, you can be certain, that the
very Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) that they established
under Article III of the Constitution, would one day trample the
document over which they had labored so hard through a hot Philadelphia
summer:
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
What then can the American people do now?
The Founding Fathers were perfect neither in deeds
nor foresight, with the result that the Constitution itself is
imperfect. In the Federalist Papers No. 81, Alexander Hamilton answered
the charge that “the errors and usurpations of the Supreme Court of the
United States will be uncontrollable and remediless,” by arguing that
“there will be no less reason to fear that the pestilential breath of
faction may poison the fountains of justice. The habit of being
continually marshalled on opposite sides will be too apt to stifle the
voice both of law and equity.”
Then again, Hamilton also thought there was no need for a Bill of Rights (Federalist No. 84).
The White House pointed a finger Monday at Congress
to “take action to solve [the] problem” created by the Supreme Court
ruling. For the odds of that happening…well, suffice it to say it won’t.
Republicans are no more eager to help American women than they are to
do anything the president wants to do – about anything.
The result is that, currently, the people of the
United States are getting the worst of both worlds, “errors and
usurpations” by the Supreme Court and the “pestilential breath of
faction” from Congress, with the result that there is, in effect, no
remedy available. There is a reason American approval of this Congress
is just north of the plague.
The Supreme Court ought to be protecting democracy.
Like the other branches of the government, it answers to the people,
after all. Instead, at the behest of those who find obtaining the
consent of the governed inconvenient to their aims of
self-aggrandizement, the Supreme Court is leading the charge against
democracy, and against the very Constitution that established it.
Under these conditions, government of the people, by
the people, for the people, is effectively dead in America and all
those soldiers at Gettysburg who, in Lincoln’s words, gave the last full
measure of devotion “that government of the people, by the people, for
the people, shall not perish from the earth,” gave it in vain.
The only recourse available to the American people
is change, a popular expression of will by the governed, a rejection of
the soul- and body-destroying agenda of the forces of wingnut reaction, and against the corporate coup that would usurp our lawful
powers as guaranteed by the Constitution.
And let’s face it: getting Hilary Clinton elected
would be a good start, and a delicious and endlessly satisfying slap in
the face of those who would steal our rights, and the rights of women
in particular.
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