Taking a break from his
busy schedule of stripping half the American populace of bodily autonomy,
Justice Samuel Alito, the smug, sneering, imperious face of a fundamentalist
SCOTUS supermajority "redefining the Constitutional landscape, and not to
Americans' liking," got a standing
ovation last week from the swanky zealots of the
Federalist Society who in large part made it possible - thus proving again,
despite Barack's best intentions, we are not really all one country.
There is no fouler proof of our divisions than the six,
Catholic, extremist justices who now make up the majority of the Supreme Court
- though the presidents who chose them have lost 7 of the last 8 popular votes
- and who are resolutely driving the country's laws "sharply to the
right" of mainstream public opinion. Alito, of
course, wrote the opinion overturning Roe v Wade, though he had to stoop to misquoting a
12-century Christian crank in his abject effort to justify revoking a right
that two-thirds of the country supports.
Amid heavy security, he was joined by
three of his accomplices - Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh - at the Federalist
Society's 40th anniversary gala, where 2,000 aging, fearful, sectarian
dinosaurs in tuxes and ball gowns applauded their sordid work holding back the
tides of change and time. Roberts had hedged on
Dobbs, calling the ruling "a jolt to the legal system." Only Clarence
Thomas of the Hard-Core Four stayed home, likely plotting the next coup with
his lovely "terrorist-in-pearls" wife Ginni, God love 'em both 'cause
who else would?
Founded in 1982 by Yale Law School students to provide a voice
for conservatives on the mostly liberal campus, the Federalist Society,
now with chapters at 200 law schools, has long, laughably billed itself as
non-partisan; because denial is the right's super-power, the Society dismisses
the notion they have "captured" the federal judiciary.
But over time, and especially during the Orange Reign, it grew
into a sort of "farm team" for extremist federal judges, with Trump
outsourcing his selection of judicial nominees to them and they, in turn,
literally handing him lists of those, who would advance their agenda.
"We're going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the
Federalist Society," he obliviously boasted in
2016, and so they were.
Over half his judicial nominees came from the Society, 15 of his
appeals court judges spoke at the conference, and their "well-oiled
machine" ultimately, lethally gave him three SCOTUS picks, more than any
modern president - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, all members of the Society. The
invidious Barrett was cheered when she spoke; she said she had "benefitted
immensely" from her ties to the Society, and it was "really nice to
have a lot of noise made not by protesters outside my house." Leonard Leo,
mastermind of the group's grip on judicial selections, also got a standing
ovation when he told the crowd, “Our movement has grown by leaps and bounds,
and so has our impact." "And boy, is your work needed today,” said nobody ever. No, wait. Alito said it.
That impact, of course, goes far beyond abortion access. After
mid-terms, many noted the
Federalist-packed SCOTUS had "helped the GOP gerrymander its way"
into control of the House, thanks to a 2019 SCOTUS ruling rejecting claims GOP
maps in Louisiana and Alabama constituted racial gerrymandering that
diluted black votes. The maps stayed; in this election, the GOP won five of its
six races in Louisiana, and six of its seven in Alabama, leading to
what one sage called, "The House that Alito built."
The Federalist gala was held before all the votes had been
tallied, but still members were palpably grateful for
all Alito and his henchmen (and woman) had done. The crowd cheered when one
speaker crowed "the Dobbs decision will be forever an indelible part of
Justice Alito's legacy." They rose to their feet, turned to their hero,
and stood triumphantly clapping after former Michigan Supreme Court justice
Stephen Markman said, "I do not know of any decision on any
court by any judge of which that judge could be more proud," never mind
all four perps lied in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe
settled law - Alito said he was "a believer in precedents" - and
their ruling obliterated all their self-righteous pretense of caring about
morality, legal principle, the Constitution or anything other than furthering
the fundamentalist GOP agenda they were fast-tracked onto the court to boost.
But no, said an
aggrieved Barrett, they are "not a bunch of partisan hacks." As to
their very presence at the Federalist fete, said one ethics expert, "The
appearances are awful."
Equally awful, and unsurprising, is the key role of Alito, the
"Patron Saint of Persecution Complexes," an "angry
man" known to have only two modes: "sneering defiance"
and "bleating indignation."
Alito inhabits a world where white Christian men are under siege, anyone criticizing his
beliefs is "bullying the court" or making him and his colleagues
"targets for assassination," a black pastor who spoke up for his
rights "threatened a race riot," he himself is free to play a rude, contemptuous,
"nakedly unjudicial" buffoon in
response to female colleagues, and the state's most vital task is punitive; in
2016, when SCOTUS rejected Florida's death penalty, only Alito dissented.
So, a grotesque human being who likely kicks puppies in his free
time, and who in a 1985 job application for Reagan's Justice Department
pointedly declared, "I personally believe very strongly the Constitution
does not protect a right to an abortion," though, again, the Constitution doesn't
mention it. In a rabid 2020 speech to
the Federalist Society blasted as
"befitting a Trump rally," Alito raged about the threats posed by
liberals - same-sex marriage and cakes for them, gun
control and religious liberty as "second-tier"
rights, COVID's "previously unimaginable restrictions on individual
liberty" - and, oof, quoted Dylan: "It's not dark yet, but it's
getting there." Most offensive is a brazen, disingenuous arrogance, from
proclaiming, "Congress has no right to interfere with (our) work" to
dismissing the impact of his Dobbs ruling on women. "We do not pretend to
know" how they will respond, he intones, but regardless, we can't
"let that knowledge influence our decision." Aka, fuck 'em.
Thus spoke a guy holding lifelong, unimaginable, unaccountable
power that protects him from the consequences of his actions, no matter how
devastating. The history of that power goes back to 1925, writes Linda
Greenhouse, when Congress gave the Court the power to select cases it wanted to
decide, thus transforming it from a "solver of disputes" to a creator
of laws shaping both its own and the country's agenda - now, toward an agenda
far to the right of most Americans.
For the right, Dobbs is the product of a political
project that goes back decades whose "one common
aspiration (was) the capture of the Supreme Court" - and with it, the
reversal of Roe. In a country where support for abortion rights has only grown
over time, she notes, "Getting the Court was not simply the obvious
choice; it was the only choice." Now, she writes, "The justices who
make up the majority have nothing in their way - that is the nature of a
supermajority.
(They), or more accurately the forces that propelled them to the
Court, have been waiting a long time for this moment." The Dobbs decision, says one
Court scholar, "may be the most legitimacy-threatening decision since the
1930s." Along with other liberal judges, Justice Elena Kagan likewise argues the
right-wing majority has broken the Court's historical bond with the public and
"is abusing its power...they undermine their legitimacy when they stray
into places where they're imposing their own personal preferences."
"The Court has great power," she says, "but it seems to have
lost any sense of its great responsibility."
And so we fight back. With Congressional action: Having
arduously negotiated bipartisan support,
Democrats shepherded through
a Respect for
Marriage Act to protect same-sex
and interracial marriage under federal law, and yes we should recognize the
insanity of a SCOTUS so extreme that Congress must act to protect interracial
marriage from it even as one justice they're protecting it from is in an
interracial marriage. Clear? We can still use the courts, sometimes. Affirming
an appeals court ruling, the Supreme Court refused to
halt a Jan. 6 subpoena for Arizona's GOP chair Kelli Ward's phone records to
see if she'd been talking with insurrection fan-girl Ginni Thomas: "What
an awkward coincidence -
they should invent a phrase for that, something like 'conflict of
interest.'" (The only dissents: Thomas and Alito.)
And a judge in Georgia struck down the
state's six-week abortion ban in a fiery decision trashing a "frothy"
Dobbs ruling that "does not retroactively revoke the force or legitimacy
of the decisions it overruled." Dobbs' authority "flows not from some
mystical higher wisdom" or "its special insight into historical
'facts'” but from "basic math." Justice Thurgood Marshall: "Power,
not reason, is the currency of this new Court's decision making." Still, warns Elie
Mystal, no illusions about "who these people are...
They are trying to usher in a fundamentalist Christian theocracy
and force the rest of us to live in it," and they will gladly destroy a
federal law protecting abortion rights unless the political winds are blowing
hard enough against them to hurt the GOP - or provoke an expanded Court. To
make that political will known, stay loud. Our fave signs from protests:
"Abort the Patriarchy" and "Ruth Sent Us." Per Raymond
Carver's "A Small, Good Thing": She's not here to see this.
-Abby Zimet
