I hate the culture wars. They debase the debate and leave our politics stuck on stupid. Thanks to Sam the Sham Alito & the Federalist Society Pharaohs, we’re neck deep in the culture wars. As I said after the leak heard round the world, they can go bork themselves. Unfortunately, they’ve borked the country.
I’m calling them the Alito Court because, while the Chief Justice agrees with them on many issues, Roberts is embarrassed to be seen with them in public. It’s like Monty Clift with Shelley Winters in A Place In The Sun. That 1951 movie turns about to be an eerie parable of our current situation: Monty wanted to dump Shelley because she’s pregnant and Elizabeth Taylor is richer and hotter. An abortion would have been a better solution than murder by drowning but the pharaohs of that day wouldn’t have allowed it. Instead, this happened:
The Theodore Dreiser novel the move is based on is An American Tragedy. Thanks to the Alito Court we’re stuck in a stupid loop of tragedy after tragedy.
The court’s reversal of Roe and Casey is an exercise of raw judicial power. Sam the Sham didn’t even eliminate some of the weirder aspects of the draft opinion. He didn’t care. He had the hammer and he used it to smash abortion rights to smithereens.
It’s hard to be a glass half full guy after the one-two punch of opinions by the court’s most extreme justices. Scalia liked having Alito and Thomas around because they made him look more reasonable. Alito spent 11 years in Scalia’s shadow sulking, waiting for his place in the sun. It finally happened in 2022. It’s Sam Alito’s court now.
We knew the Dobbs atrocity was coming but Thomas’ opinion in the New York gun law case was *almost* as bad. In Bruen, Thomas used cartoon originalism to strike down a venerable law that restricted carrying a gun to those who could justify it. Perhaps he’s seen too many Westerns and can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. In real life, John Wayne was a draft dodger who was afraid of horses.
Thomas seems to think the 19th Century was a libertarian paradise where everyone carried weapons and the world was safer because of good guys with guns. To paraphrase Warren Zevon, it was really an era of “sweat, piss, jizz, and blood.” The grandpa in Play It All Night Long pissed his pants. That’s what Alito and Thomas did in their majority opinions in Dobbs and Bruen.
Hit it, Warren:
Justices Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayor derided Thomas and Alito’s majority opinions as “law office history.” I called it cartoon originalism above because they’re like Elmer Fudd searching for something, anything to justify their reasoning.
Cartoon originalism is frightening because capital punishment was common in the 19th Century. Burglary used to be a capital crime. Do we want to go back to those days? That’s where Sam the Sham Alito & the Federalist Society Pharaohs are taking us.
The most disturbing moment in one of the worst weeks in SCOTUS history came from Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs:
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents.”
Clarence Thomas wants to throw out the cases that overturned laws against contraception, sodomy, and same sex marriage because he hates how the rulings were arrived at. Like all wingnuts, he’s a selfish bastard: his harangue omits the Loving case that legalized interracial marriage. If it’s a result he likes, it’s okay if substantive due process is the basis.
I’m a Supreme Court history buff. My respect for the court wavered after Bush v. Gore but now it’s shattered. The five extremist judges have the hammer and they’re using it to smash our constitutional rights. In contrast, three Republican appointees, Justices Souter, O’Connor, and Kennedy blinked at an attempt to overrule Roe in 1992: Casey became the controlling opinion. They believed in stare decisis, Sam the Sham Alito and the Federalist Society Pharaohs do not.
The Alito Court doesn’t care about public opinion. In fact, they have contempt for it. That was not always so. In the deliberations leading up to the Brown decision, Justice Frankfurter was concerned that adverse public opinion in the South would make the ruling unenforceable. He added the phrase “with all deliberate speed,” which has been widely criticized as sending a mixed signal. It was, however, a sign that the Warren Court cared about the real-world consequences of its opinions. The world would be a better place if the Alito Court moved with all deliberate speed. Instead, they’re a clear and present danger to our rights.
The last word goes to Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs:
These five justices need to be impeached in the House with those decisions sent on to the Senate for trial. The testimony from their confirmation hearings show their efforts to deliberately mislead / lie to the Senators and people in the U.S. and as we have seen, use their positions to as you have noted, our constitutional rights. Since you published your entry, their decision to further wipe out the boundary between church and state has been published.
We are already far enough down the road of separate tiers of justice for society as it is, doing nothing cements in separate and unequal is the law..
Every Supreme Court decision these people have engaged in should be examined again. Set up a panel based upon four groups, the west coast — includes Alaska and Hawaii, the mid-section, the east coast and the fourth group representing Native jurisdictions and US Territories. Each group would have three members, two public defenders and one federal prosecutor. These groups review the decisions and give a vote: yes or no as to whether or not the case should be reheard. If a simple majority of the entire panel votes no, the case stands, if the vote is a tie or the majority vote is yes, the case must be re-litigated.