Don't Despair -- Fight

 

This morning in the Washington Post, Max Boot has an excellent column that I urge you to read. With the news of the past several weeks, the United States has continued to roll towards an abyss that will mean the end of our democracy unless we hit the brakes hard. The Supreme Court has abased itself, through a six-person conservative majority, into nothing more than a junta. The conservative justices obviously believe they are not a co-equal branch of government ⇒ they believe they are the Supreme branch of government. Overturning Roe v Wade will not be their final slash at American democracy. With the other rulings about guns, Miranda rights, and the environment, they made clear that SCOTUS as it is composed is nothing more than an arm of the GOP, both its MAGA crazies and the wealthy plutocrats who bought and paid for this moment like Charles Koch. 

The fake concept of originalism, expounded by the Borks and Scalias and others of the Federalist Society, is plainly not what the Founding Fathers were thinking in Philadelphia in 1787 when the Constitution was written. To quote from Boot’s essay,

Most of the Founders knew better than to try to shackle their progeny to their own worldview. Thomas Jefferson rejected the tendency to “look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” He argued “that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”

The Founding Fathers were products of the Enlightenment, holding no truck with superstition (including the hocus-pocus of religion) and having faith in progress and science. The process for amending the Constitution and a Supreme Court that stays on its rails were part of their idea for dealing with a future that they could not see but could imagine – a future different from 1787 in myriad ways.

I agree with Boot that there are many ways we could ensure a real democracy here. Getting rid of the Electoral College would be great but is impossible at the present time. The Electoral Count Act however must be changed to forestall another armed coup attempt by the radical right in the names of “freedom” and “patriotism” as they see those in their warped lenses – lenses of white male supremacy. Expansion of the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court is way overdue; both are antidemocratic in their current formats. 

The radical right, in conjunction with religions that desire a return to centuries past, is coming for other rights too. In Florida, criminalizing the LGBTQ community is proceeding through indoctrination in schools. Women are next in jeopardy of the right to vote, which was not in the Constitution as the originalist will say. Slavery was never mentioned in the Constitution but was only abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment; who is to say white nationalists will not go after that?

David Ignatius’s column today is also worth reading. I remain an optimist, as does he, but he provides this link to a long report from RAND, commissioned by the Pentagon, that is chilling. Another tome on my reading list – it is downloadable as a free pdf file. Finally, E.J. Dionne’s essay on the Fourth is also good – we are torn about what we love about these United States. I will leave you with Dionne’s conclusion:

“One can be a critic of one’s country,” the great social thinker Daniel Bell wrote, “without being an enemy of its promise.” On this July Fourth, that promise is still worth celebrating — and fighting for.

Time to write more postcards and letters to voters in swing states – the midterms are only 127 days away.