(from the waning days of Caligula, January 2021)

"Power always thinks it is doing God's service, when it is violating all of his laws."    ---  John Adams

IMPEACH JOHN ROBERTS, AND END MINORITY RULE

                                                 

The daily viewing of reality television from our nation's capitol is now compulsory, at least in the sense of being unable to escape it.  The only reality television we would choose to watch, of course, is the Hollywood film that pokes fun at the entire genre by allowing us to clandestinely watch the television viewers who clandestinely watch the unwitting hero.  (I bet someone is covertly watching us too.)  The Truman Show tells the home audience straight to its face that the entire spectacle is a fraud, while violating the civil liberties of the protagonist on multiple levels.  Truman Burbank is imprisoned, and he doesn't even know it. ....  Admittedly, if the guard were charming as Meryl Burbank, I’d probably hold off on asking for the public defender myself.

Me and my friend Paul, a class-action attorney and former Drill Sergeant, often have a discussion about the true extent of freedom in America;  from, say, a quantitative perspective.  I argue structural inequalities or barriers, not entirely unlike those faced by Truman, while Paul politely asks, over and over:  "And whose fault is that?"  He is constantly reminding me that we have to maintain the highest bridges and deepest roads of democracy.  Democracy is procedural fairness in the courtroom and the legislature and the voting booth for everyone, top to bottom.  No more, no less.  The best things in life are still free.         

                                                            

Bush v. Gore and Shelby v. Holder, i.e., Bush v. Gore on judicial steroids, were crimes of the highest order;   a refusal to let the other side even speak, via its vote.  The 1965 Voting Rights Act is a FEDERAL law, promising equal protection at the ballot box from sea to shining sea.  The state of Florida violated Section 5 preclearance requirements in late 2000 like preclearance had never been violated before, via a) “exact match” voter purges that were more illegitimate in their conception than they were wildly inaccurate in their execution   ---   the infamous Shrub Scrub   ---   revolving around  the fact that Database Technologies and Frank Borman included thousands of ex-felons whose crime had been committed and probation served in a different state such as Texas, after which that federal right to vote had been restored* and b)  daughter-of-privilege Kathleen Harris certifying the final vote count as both Florida Secretary of State and Co-Chair of the Committee to Elect George W. Bush;  a massive conflict of interest, the fox guarding the electoral henhouse. Kathleen also set records for abuse of the public purse on foreign travel junkets.

Bush v. Gore then denied, on the basis of an arbitrary time limit, a recount of even those votes that had been marked correctly and counted mechanically.  Antonin Scalia and his fellow conspirators were so lacking the courage of their convictions that they refused to sign the document, in a per curiam display of sheepishness; a strong precedent, btw, for a glaring  surge in injunctions from the so-called shadow court against covid restrictions on religious gatherings. (Shelby later dismantled preclearance for the entire Confederacy, not just Florida, by declaring the coverage formula in Section 4(b) of the VRA unconstitutional.  Within 48 hours, states from Texas to Wisconsin to North Carolina began to implement strict voter-ID rules that targeted African Americans with a “surgical precision”**:  by attacking motor voting and early/absentee voting and party-line/single-ticket voting that lets us pull the lever for all of the candidates from a single party, or simply closing down almost all polling stations in places such as Fulton County, GA, currently home to 15% of the Peach state’s Democratic voters.)  And if the undervotes/no-votes and overvotes/two-votes represent potentially legal votes, it is an obvious violation of equal protection for these votes not to be counted:  14.4% of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected, compared with 1.6% of nonblack Florida voters***.  John Roberts supervised the entire thing, from the sidelines, as senior advisor to Governor Jeb Bush.  If not that, Mr. Roberts, what were you doing in Tallahassee?  Family vacation?     

 

Until and unless we elect and nominate politicians and judges who understand from personal experience what it is like to be poor or assaulted or disenfranchised or arrested for an unreasonable search, the lot of the average citizen will never improve.  (Ironically, lawyer Gandhi forgot to add justice without compassion to his list of deadly social sins:  politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, etc.)  In the meantime, we need to fire some corrupt judges.  It's the mother of all class-action lawsuits because the plaintiff is not so much the Solicitor General as the people themselves, in their own House:  USA v. Roberts.  If the judge himself refuses to abide by the law and there is nothing we can do about it, we are obviously fooling ourselves with all this gibberish about democracy.  Marbury v. Madison, the most important lawsuit in human history, established the legitimacy of judicial review, the power of the Court to overturn laws of Congress as well as the injudicious acts of both an autocratic chief executive and those who directly serve him.  But it left unanswered a crucial question:  Who overturns the crimes of the judiciary?  Who is minding the minders of the Supreme Law?  (Checks and balances is a legal and populist hall of mirrors, democracy reflected back at itself.)  Chief Justice Marshall endorsed William Marbury's commission for minor office but avoided a Constitutional crisis with President Thomas Jefferson, who would have outright ignored a direct order from the Court, by tossing it back down to the lower courts on jurisdictional and enforcement terms.  It is time to return jurisdiction, at least for a while, to the lowest court in the land.  That court is me, and you.

It is always the commoner whose rage is just because it is always the commoner who suffers most, and democracy dies from his silence.  …   J’accuse!  John Roberts is a judicial outlaw and Gorsuch/Barrett were the direct application of force by a tyrant from Kentucky, a triumph of theft over hard labor.  If the wheezing Constitution were a human heart, the cardiologist would recommend vigorous exercise and fresh air:

1.  Amend Article V governing the torturous amendment process itself, via national plebiscite.  The Supreme Law has not been touched in almost thirty years, to say nothing of the fact that we couldn’t get 3/4 of state legislatures to agree on the weather these days.  Let’s shoot for 2/3 as the threshold for ratification of amendments instead, just as 2/3 of state legislatures is said by Article V to be sufficient for demanding change in the first place.  Also lower the latter, to 51%.  (A majority proposes changes, a supermajority approves them.)  Despite Kurt Godel's admonition that a more malleable amendment process might be defined downward towards fascism by, say, formalizing martial law as a presidential prerogative along with his treaty power, both right and left will only get angrier if elections continue as pre-packaged corporate spectacles that benefit nobody other than the shareholders of television networks.   

2. The Electoral College is a nakedly racist thing, counting only 3/5 of slaves when apportioning Representatives from Dixie, prior to the Reconstruction Amendments.  (13 ended slavery; 14 gifted citizenship; 15 granted the vote, at least until United States v. Cruikshank, overturning the convictions in the Colfax Massacre and generally leading to the solidification of the KKK.)  But that is not its most egregious flaw.  It is rooted first in Adams's small-state fear of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican mob, a fear of proportional as opposed to indirect or preferential democracy.  It is now approaching 3/5 of the entire citizenry that is being counted by the census for purposes of apportionment, while being denied a meaningful vote by the EC:  pro-choice women, disenfranchised felons, homeless veterans, homosexuals, and wealth-producing urbanites.  The ten smallest and mostly-rural states have ¼ the population of the largest state, California, yet they receive 2.5 more Electors per resident:  33 Electors for 10 million residents, versus 55 Electors for 40 million residents in the Golden State.  33 Electors multiplied four times for population increase is 132.  If simple numerical fairness is our guide, sizable state borders aside, California should be given an additional 77 Electoral votes, i.e., 132 minus 55.  If we seek instead to balance numerical fairness with the College, California’s population should be reduced to 16 million residents by the creation of two new states containing the other 24 million residents and 77 Electors, via Article IV/Section 3.   ….   Do the math of proportionality, with E for Elector and R for 1 million residents:  If 33E/10R = 55E/xR, then x = 16R.  40R/16R = 2.5, the loss multiplier for current California voters against voters from small states in a Presidential election.  In simple terms:   If you want your vote for President to truly matter, move to Montana or Vermont.  If you are a single-issue voter and that issue is guns, pick either state.

Instead of breaking up states, I suggest we think hybrid, a Constitutional revision setting the stage for a statutory cancellation.  Repeal the 12th Amendment’s nationwide Electoral College as a violation of both Occam’s razor and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, just as the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th.  Dubya lost the popular vote by a sliver, whereas President Trump lost by three-million votes in 2016.  If the popular-vote discrepancy continues to climb, as it surely will inside a fractured electoral map that Rube Goldberg would admire, we are headed for greater chaos and rage than those two elections combined: Witness the tens of millions of voters parroting Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen.  …..  Let's pause there for a moment:  It's the Democrats who are supposedly stealing elections, not John Roberts or Mitch McConnell, who refuses to pay for software upgrades to voting machines or to permit automatic voting registration when we renew our driver's licenses or to make Election Day a national holiday.  Btw, you know who does these sorts of things quite successfully?  The Brits.  You know what  Britain does not have?   A written Constitution.

I repeat:  Federalism, a compound system of power and glorious refinement of res publica, has now been turned against most citizens by the Electoral College.  (Compound is not dual or equal.  Dual federalism expresses a contradiction, like Peacekeeper missile or jumbo shrimp.)  If either 1)  a sufficient number of small and strategic states finds a collective champion at the federal level in either a despotic Chief Executive such as Trump or an unscrupulous Chief Justice such as Roberts or both, or 2)  like-minded coalitions in swing states band together on a regular basis, the tyranny of the minority becomes dispositional rather than episodic, a structural thing impervious to electoral remedies.  And the National Popular Vote compact, awarding all of a state’s electors to the winner of the NPV, does not solve the spoiler problem, i.e., that either the left or the right might significantly split its national vote between two candidates, one endorsed by the establishment and the other an independent, unintentionally handing the presidential election to the plurality on the other side.  Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose kicked President Taft to the sidelines in 1912, and Texas billionaire Ross Perot took almost 20% of the national GOP vote from Bush the Elder in 1992.  Plurality winners Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton won the election, with a lower vote tally than the two candidates from the other party-ies combined.   …...   By way of comparison, instant-runoff-voting guarantees an executive claiming a majority of the NPV in addition to safely encouraging third parties such as the Libertarians or the Greens.  (Safely means that the Greens cannot take votes away from the Democratic candidate, who would likely be their second choice under IRV.)  It also encourages turnout, which greatly stinks under the current system.  Only a few states are in play. 

Then repeal or overturn Shelby, its statutory stepchild, by impeaching the vote thief who wrote it.  If wrongdoers aren’t punished, they keep coming back.  The Dred Scott debacle, separate and unequal on the plantation, birthed Plessy v. Ferguson, equal but still separate on the streetcar, which left the daughter of Oliver Brown in a segregated school.  We may not have colored classrooms anymore, thanks to Thurgood Marshall, but we shonuf have colored voting booths.  Our work is unfinished.  And the enemy is a guy who thought it a reasonable and good-faith exercise of police power, in Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, to stick a crying kid in the pokey for eating a French fry in a metro station, because warrantless misdemeanor arrests of minors do not require Constitutional attention.  Guess what color her skin was.  Circuit Judge Roberts displayed a similar disdain for the domestic reach of the Third Geneva Convention, specifically tailored toward non-international conflicts, demanding humane treatment for detained prisoners of war.  Guess what color his skin was, post 9/11, at a secluded US internment camp called Guantanamo Bay.  It’s called a results test:   Forget high-falutin’ denials and look directly at the consequences of Roberts's behavior.  It’s how parents treat lying teenagers, and how Section 2 of the VRA looks at racially-discriminatory voting laws.  Strict judicial scrutiny further demands that legislative bias be narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest, though not the one defined against Japanese Americans by “liberal textualist" Hugo Black in Korematsu, where strict scrutiny was first applied.  Just as an unavenged Dred Scott birthed Homer Plessy as a plaintiff, Fred Korematsu later changed his name to Salim Ahmed  Hamdan.      

And btw, we haven’t even mentioned the indirect results and consequences of the above or Bush v. Gore, such as the illegal invasion of Iraq and upper-income tax cuts during war, cuts that were permanently extended in December 2012. (With friends like Barack and Michelle Obama, the left does not require enemies.  Two mansions, btw, one for each, after being broke twenty years ago.)  So much for shared sacrifice.  American soldiers were slaughtered based on lies while Lloyd Blankfein was lighting up his stogie with a burning C note.   Burning of our money, solely because they can, is and always has been the business model of Wall Street, our above-the-law American Politburo.   The first financial  domino to fall back in 2008 was the CDS division of AIG.  The man who intentionally collapsed the entire US housing market, a collapse essential for Credit Default Swaps to pay off, skipped town to Mayfair with $200M of TARP/bailout money.  If that doesn't make you angry, nothing will, though Crooked Joe Cassano is not our topic of conversation at the moment.  

3.  The Senate   ---   Article I/Section III and Article V, again   ---   needs to be repaired in multiple ways.  First, equal suffrage between small and large states is an obvious farce, a further deterioration of the Republic into tyranny by a permanent demographic minority.  The Dakotas and Wyoming have approximately three-million people, but six senators.  California has forty-million people and two senators.  Second, the entire body, regardless of size, must be rendered subservient in every way to the people's House.  (Switch upper and lower, or remove the designations entirely.  The Constitution won’t notice.)  The defining feature of res publica is public ownership, not hereditary wealth, which is to say that the dissolution and fall of Rome began in its Senate, a Senate comprised of trust-fund babies and opportunistic or bored spouses of the aristocracy.  Pass the ketchup, Theresa Heinz, back to all of us.    Third, six-year terms must be reduced to four, because Madison's fear of hasty measures, Federalist 58, has been supplanted and ultimately inverted by the hasty ignorance of a hysterical Twitter mob that complements and sets the Senate agenda through permanent obstructionism.  Allowing a Senator from a state with slightly more than 1% of total US population to control all appointments to the federal judiciary       ---   a full third of the appellate courts have recently been staffed by young Caucasian ideologues, many deemed “unqualified " by their peers in the ABA   ---   is a crime similar to but even worse than the  racial crimes of John Roberts. Fourth, recycle the Senate multimillionaires via mandatory retirement at age seventy.   The Supreme Law demands minimum ages for public service.  Why not maximums?

4. Merge Article II/Section 2 into Article I/Section 8.  Restore civilian control of the military, by demanding the Advice and Consent of Congress in calling forth the armed forces.  (Imagine what we could do with an extra $1.5 trillion   ---   don’t overlook massive accounting fraud at the Pentagon   ---   in the federal treasury.  I’d start by forgiving student debt.  Poverty is violence, particularly when inflicted upon the young.)  Put the President directly in the line of political fire, like the British PM.  No more strongman, or strongwoman.  No more war-as-personal-vendetta.  No more Terror Tuesday, launching targeted drone strikes on innocent civilians in faraway places.  No more pardons for war criminals, vis-à-vis Bush the Elder sweeping Iran Contra under the rug with a rubber-stamp from Attorney General Barr.  Bush was essentially pardoning himself, because McFarlane and Weinberger and Abrams could no longer be called by Special Prosecutor Walsh as eyewitnesses against the former Vice President for secretly selling WMDs to the nation his own State Department had listed     ---     incorrectly, I might add     ---   as the primary sponsor of international terrorism, and then using those funds to continue a brutal secret war prohibited by the Boland Amendments.  National Security Advisors Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter even kept their government pensions, unlike FBI whistleblowers from the aughts regarding rendition and torture.  Heck, Ollie North is still advocating an invasion of the entire Middle East on Faux News, rather than finishing up his sentence in Leavenworth.  ****

5. Return the 2nd Amendment to its original and collective purpose   ---   the dominant clause is the first clause, and vice versa   ---   or discard it entirely.  State militias were required to confront citizen rebellions such as Shays because the Republic was broke in the early days, particularly at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.  George Washington had to ask the states for money and/or troops, under the Articles, and they usually if not often said no.  Please keep in mind as well that Madison’s original formulation of the 2nd Amendment mentioned a well-regulated militia twice, via the conscientious-objector clause.  Oh, and nearly two-million infants will sleep this very evening within close distance of an active firearm, as in a loaded gun with the safety lock off that is not locked away in a safe.  (At least 285 children got hold of a gun and inadvertently shot themselves or someone else in 2017, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.)  When a toddler accidentally blows off his own head, does the NRA still wish to blame the shooter rather than the gun?

Democracy is not a suicide pact.  From Colfax LA to Parkland FL to Newtown CT, the unchecked 2nd Amendment is a baby killer.  And guess who helped create an individual right to bear arms, purportedly for self-defense, in District of Columbia v. Heller:  John Roberts.  A self-described originalist failed to notice that the word “individual” does not appear in the 2nd Amendment,  though his predecessors certainly did.  SCOTUS hadn’t touched the 2nd Amendment since US v. Miller in 1939.  Led by an arch-conservative Justice, Miller outlawed Tommy guns and silencers and the interstate transport of sawed-off shotguns in a horrified response to Prohibition and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, while loudly proclaiming the connection between gun ownership and service in the militia, what we now call the National Guard.  …...   The important caveat herein is that Justice McReynolds would never have endorsed the overall or larger suggestion that broad unalienable rights can be reduced via textualism to the semantic straitjacket of a grocery-store checklist.  (In Myers v. Nebraska, he openly embraced substantive due process for Germans post WW1.)  The words “slavery” and "citizen suffrage” are not mentioned in the original text of the Constitution, back in 1791.  Are the 13th and 19th Amendments a mistake, Judge Roberts?

6.   Update Article III by outlawing lifetime appointments for SCOTUS, just as Chief Justice Marshall reinterpreted the Judiciary Act of 1789 in the aforementioned Marbury v. Madison.  Lifetime appointments are a corruption two-fer:  Supreme Court justices should be elected rather than appointed   ---   checks and balances!   ---  and that should coincide with the presidential election;  internally staggered, however,  such that a maximum of three judges is replaced at any one time, with interim presidential  appointments  for death or retirement requiring full hearings, including veto power by the House Judiciary Committee, and a firm rejection of the segregationist blue-slip veto. (The judge gets to keep her/his job up to age seventy-five, a bit longer than a Senator, as long as s/he keeps winning elections.  If RBG had faced mandatory retirement, we never would have gotten stuck with Amy Coney Barrett.)  Sweet sassy molassy, as brother Ray would say, a performance review once every twelve years is hardly an unreasonable request.  I get one every twelve minutes, at my office.  Here’s your precedent:   We appointed rather than elected Senators to the House of Lords in the beginning because the aristocrats refused to answer directly to the commoner at the ballot box.  Because of the 17th Amendment, they now do.  Change happens because we make it happen.

Packing and cracking of congressional districts via the Rucho gerrymander is equally to blame for urban-vote suppression and dilution   ---   an ongoing violation of the “one person, one vote” reapportionment standard of Reynolds v. Sims, though I cite case law only to affirm the historical nature of the struggle     ---   leading one to wonder why we need such districts for national elections in the first place.  Why doesn’t the honorable gentleman from Atlanta or Valdosta simply represent the entire state?  As an African American friend of mine from the inner city likes to joke, over drinks: "We’re all (insert N word) now."  As in counted, but ignored.  And that's if you're lucky.  Agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley aren’t even counted.  They don’t want ICE to find them. 

I further suggest that I am less of a heretic than you think.  Everything I mention, other than ruinous foreign wars and the equally murderous 2nd Amendment, concerns only the procedural mechanisms of representative government, the messy business of getting politicians and judges into office and then out at a later date.  I am not suggesting for a second that we touch our natural Lockean rights, expressed first by the BOR and then incorporated at the state level by the Reconstruction Amendments, those rights we all possess merely by virtue of our citizenship and our humanity.  We are all going to keep our immunity against unreasonable search and double jeopardy and self incrimination, as well as privileges such as free legal counsel.  Face your accuser with gusto.  Tell the bastard his breath stinks, for all I care.

But keep in mind that John Adams was so terrified of the Roman mob   ---   see 2, above   ---   that he briefly became a despot himself with the Alien and Sedition Acts.  (Socrates was put down by a democratic Senate, not the Thirty Tyrants.)  This is why Madison picked a fight over a minor official like William Marbury a few years later.  Madison was that pissed, just as Trump freaked out because Obama had the temerity to poke fun at his harebrained hair.  The Manchurian Moptop never lets a critic or a barber anywhere near his big head, because the barber might accidentally knick that overinflated ego.  We’ll have to give Big Brother a haircut with the law instead by forcing him to address the House of Representatives far  more often than the annual State of the Union:  Move Article II/Section 3 into Article I also.  The only members of the general public ever addressed by Trump were the few who consented to loyalty oaths inside Republican strongholds such as West Virginia and Alabama.  Trump, like Dubya before him, refused public press conferences more often than a child refuses to eat vegetables. 

The Constitution cannot continue to act as an embargo on the popular will.  Federalist democracy must be reclaimed as majority rule wrapped around strong 1st and 5th Amendment protections for minority voices   ---   along the lines of the nonviolent American Communist Party, but not Stormfront   ---   or it is nothing but a prison of our own choosing.  (The show cannot go on, once the deceit has been exposed.)  Let us unimprison ourselves, by updating the Supreme Law.  We do not do monarchs in America, not even on paper.  Free-thinking men and women write their own rules.  They do not take orders from the deceased, who did the best they could.   What's the best we could?  We'll never know, unless we try.  Besides, they'll do it to us if we do not do it properly first.  I guarantee it.  You may have noticed I did not mention changing the people's House   ---   particularly the Apportionment Act of 1911 that caps representation from growing states, yet another statutory gift to the shrinking Dakotas   ---   other than improving its overall position against a domineering House of Lords.  But you know who is considering sweeping changes to the rules inside the House of Commons, at this very moment?  Charles/David Koch, and ALEC.  They are emboldened as never before.  See Kavanaugh, Brett;  who, btw, has been in the works for decades.  The theocrats have always been single-issue.  It has always been Roe, even if the potential fifth vote would not make it past the bar’s Character and Fitness Committee these days.  The financial improprieties alone   ---   $200K in credit-card debt for Washington Nationals baseball tickets, of all things, paid off by one of his wealthy benefactors   ---   would get him laughed out of the room.  Let’s not permit bibulous Brett to decide any bankruptcy cases, eh?

"The smartest and most courageous people I ever met do not wear business suits. They wear combat fatigues."  Preach, Paul.  Lead us into battle.  (“Men don’t follow a leader because they are afraid of his temper.  Men follow a leader because they are afraid of losing his respect,” and Paul’s entire platoon would readily follow him into hell with gas tanks strapped to their backs.)  Roberts is the broken-down offramp to the wrong side of the moral and judicial tracks.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Who minds the minders?  WE DO.  We all need to raise our game, and like John Adams, I’d rather choose to pick up the quill than eventually be forced to pick up a bayonet.  Think in terms of what environmentalists and Hippocrates call the harm principle:  Let's prevent harm in the first place rather than manage it later.  Juridical reason at its finest has delivered swift and unprecedented immunities against discrimination and privileges to marry for gay people, over the blistering dissent of John Roberts from Obergefell v. Hodges, in record time.  Aim for the stars.  No magic in small dreams.

 

I see this as an employment dispute.  John Roberts and his votebusting crew are essentially rogue employees.  They work for us.  You bet your bottom dollar I can fire John Roberts, if enough people agree with me.  Old guys get fired every day:  "Time to go."  And if there's something that says I can't do that, we need to change that too.  Everyone has a boss, someone to answer to in the end.  (Who is minding the boss?)  American capitalism is all of Plato's civic and social evils rolled into one:  military dictatorship for most of the planet as well as a heavily-armed and deeply-paranoid populace at home, aristocracy and divine right of kings, susceptibility to demagoguery, plutocracy/theft, oligarchy, surveillance, Spartan intolerance of civil liberties for minorities enforced by police chokeholds and unpunished vigilantism, all of it.  Imagine if we could transport just the management structure of something like a platoon to government itself     ---   not a military platoon, of course   ---   in order to deal with sudden or ongoing emergencies such as climate change or the coronavirus.  Science to the rescue!  Peer review, and feedback loops!  The IPCC is coming for you, GOP, with rising sea-levels of outrage.  Legislatures never act until the problem has reached crisis levels.   They need a push, and they aren’t going to get it from the likes of Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama.  The refusal to impeach Dubya for massive war crimes and to punish Wall Street for monumental financial crimes when the left controlled all three branches of government were the worst things that ever happened to America.  Traitors are far more dangerous than the obvious enemy.  We defeated the Redcoats and the Confederates and Adolf Hitler.  But we couldn’t defeat Mitch McConnell and Dick Cheney, because we didn’t even try.   Let’s try harder for Mother Nature, by installing stronger feedback loops into the Constitution itself.

That platoon, btw, used to be called a judiciary.  But our actual deep-state is the very bowels of the court system, entirely controlled by the Federalist Society.  Said society was inspired by keynote-speaker Robert Bork of Saturday Night Massacre fame.  In addition to firing the Watergate special prosecutor, Bork opposed female suffrage and the integration of lunch counters.  John Roberts is a far-craftier opponent who has been playing the long game before we were even on to him.  Democracy is begging the infantry, the commoner, to come to the rescue, with something like a grass-roots yet scalable lawsuit to at least fix or replace the decrepit voting machines;  not just physically decrepit, but morally decrepit.  If you voted for Ross Perot in 1992, you gave him far more than your vote.  You gave him your tax dollars as well, because a large chunk of Dallas-based ES&S’s billions comes from the manufacture of voting machines.  I like to think of the voting lever as the beer tap of democracy, opinions formed over drinks flowing straight from the bar stool to Washington DC, and a compromised ballot leads to what recovering alcoholics call drinking for the wrong reasons.  Without my ballot, honest and true, I win an argument with Paul that I prefer to lose.  Those structural barriers really are immovable.  Democracy commits suicide, as it always has.

Both the blessing and the curse of Athenian democracy was the noise.  There's so much of it that we are all talking past one another in staged shouting-matches on cable news, for the financial gain of the few and the political loss of the many.  The power of the Fourth Estate, as Professor Chomsky reminds us, lies not in what it tells us but in what it refuses to tell us.  Censorship is at its worst on the boob tube, where advertisers determine content, unless it’s the right accusing others of its own sins.  Remember freedom fries?  Political correctness was at its zenith under Sean Hannity’s patriotism police, after 9/11.  (The hippies were right, shoot your television.  In lieu of a firearm, you can beat your television with a large aluminum bat.)  And, of course, Bush cousin John Ellis called Election 2000 on Fox, immediately after polls closed on the left coast.  Four minutes later, Peter Jennings at ABC and Dan Rather at CBS folded like cheap accordions.  The liberal media is running out of liberals. 

The many, lads, not the few, are the rightful owners of the public airwaves.  Fox and CNN are using our stuff without paying for it.  Let’s cut their pay by reducing campaign season to thirty days for primaries and sixty days for a general election;  again, a statutory challenge only.  Easy peasy.  And resurrect the Fairness Doctrine, with publicly-funded television;  not funded voluntarily by the general public, but federally-funded by taxes and mandated by law.  Or at least make Comcast pay me to watch the damn commercials, not the other way around.  I never purchase anything that is heavily advertised, be it chips or candidates.  Btw, the evisceration of campaign-finance restrictions in McCutcheon and Citizens United were the brainchild of ….   John Roberts.  The self-described umpire isn’t just calling pitches.  He’s enlarged the strike-zone against democracy.    Or call it the NASCAR Court:  If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'.

Ultimately, both law and philosophy insist that all rules or barriers are of a cognitive nature only, as easy to modify as the words of a first-time author by the pen of her editor.  The abstractions and precedents of common law and stare decisis were often built inductively from the workaday statutes of civil law, the legislative application of the lessons from history as obtained through everyday experience.   The first lawsuit wasn't over abortion or affirmative action or the commission of William Marbury for justice of the peace.  It was over something more simple, like a customer complaint in an outdoor market.  Let's say I live in Crete during the 6th Century, post Roman collapse, under the rule of Justinian I and his spontaneously evolving jus civile.  (I'm a Cretan, or at least that’s what everyone tells me.)  Guy sells me a watermelon.  I take it home.  I cut it open, and there are worms inside.  No biggie, the watermelon guy is my pal.  I'll take it back.  Lo and behold, the watermelon guy himself is stuck with boxes upon boxes of bad watermelons.  He tells me to take my watermelon to the guy who sold him the watermelons in the first place, because I'm the tenth customer to ask for a refund today.  I say bugger you and your problems, gimme’ my money now.  I have better things to do with my day than chase some peddler of bad watermelons all over the island.  Besides, I'm running out of evidence.  Those worms are hungry.

Then I walk out because it's too much effort for too little reward, mumbling loudly to myself because I mistakenly believed that the watermelon guy was my friend.  Someone overhears me and says that his watermelon is worm food too.  Strength in numbers.  Let's see if there are any more of us.  I scream out loud: "ANYBODY ELSE GOT WORMS IN HIS WATERMELON?"  Our numbers grow and it is worth the lawyer’s time to speak for all of us, as a single plaintiff.  Better call Paul, before Paul has no choice but to call upon the sword in order to settle larger disputes of a similar nature in the future.  ….   

The quill or the bayonet.  Revise one sentence in Article V, then staple the petition to every telephone pole in the land.  (Democracy is one lost puppy these days.)  Do it old-school so Facebook can’t alter it and Google can’t bury it   ---   our peer-reviewed knowledge engine runs, as always, on ink   ---   and do it before Rome collapses or gets sacked again.  Heck, I love feeding that paper ballot into the optical scanner on election day.   If the scanner breaks, we’ll count them Amend-Article-V ballots by hand.  And if rancorous Roger Stone or juvenile Joel Kaplan busts into the room in order to disrupt the proceedings, I’ll remove him myself.  Any man would, if his ancestors hail from Lexington and Concord and Breeds Hill.  I’m referring to you, reader.  Your debt to democracy is now due.  Overdue, actually.   The status quo is for turncoats like the corporate Democrats, and one of its original weapons was Article V.   It’s sitting right there at the end of the document, like an extra wall beyond the moat.  We’ll need to drain or cover the moat on our way inside the musty castle, but we can’t do that unless we first knock down the outer wall.  It’s actually a minor change, 3/4 to 2/3, but sometimes smaller changes lead to larger ones.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Besides, it’s not as though the left has anything better to do these days, because Barack Obama’s grand bargain appeased Mitch McConnell rather than  vigorously oppose him.  Or as my African American pal often wisecracks:  “I’m still waiting for a black president”, referring to the suckerpunch from convict James O'Keefe that quickly destroyed the leading minority voting-rights group, an effort that had been unsuccessful for decades. Things are undone until someone does them.  Sir Edmund Hillary was told for years that he could not reach the roof of the world on foot, but refused to listen.  Yes we can impeach Jim Crow, and we should.

In summation, America is right back to where we started, smug and wealthy old white men such as Bill O’Reilly telling the rest of us to shut up.  Mean men make mean laws.  First, they came after racial minorities with the noose.  Then they came after them with fire hoses, and police dogs.  Then they came after civil rights with literacy tests and poll taxes, the latter eventually outlawed by the 24th Amendment.  Then they came after us with John Roberts.  (The only downside to earlier female suffrage is that black women would have suffered the same violent fate as their men.)  America is not becoming something she never was.  America is revealing who she always was and still is, compliments of the Federalist Society.  From the vote to the gun to the clinic   ---   and earlier, going back to the Lochner era of supremacy for private contract rights over the rights of bakery employees to work reasonable hours  ---   conservative jurisprudence is nothing more than the codification of the subjective political preferences of the ruling class.  The Golden Rule in America, as always, is that he with the gold makes the rules.  On the other hand, rules were made to be broken.  And we are not going backwards without a ferocious fight.  My wife’s uterus is the redneck’s gun.  Textualist Black, finding no bodily privacy in the Supreme Law, owes Estelle Griswold a long-overdue  apology. 

MLK crossed a dangerous bridge in Selma on behalf of poor janitors and housekeepers, not stockbrokers or CEOs, because the good reverend understood what Roberts and his ilk do not:  The law is far more than a tort, a means to an end, a way of getting or keeping money or property from someone else.  It is a thing of beauty unto itself, like a nice sunset or the roof of the Sistine Chapel.  Speech at the negotiating table and petition in a court of law and religion in our houses of worship and assembly in the public square, the very first things Madison mentioned, were designed to lift our spirits rather than fatten our wallets.  (Madison began his appeal to the Second Continental Congress for passage of the Bill of Rights with a paean to “wise and liberal men.”  This proud son of the South was also a true-blue liberal, to say nothing of the fact that GOP and Stalinesque red is the color of fascism.)  The law is civic love for all:  procedural fairness and integrity, even for prisoners via habeas corpus.  The most significant clients that John and Abigail Adams ever defended, at considerable personal peril, were the British soldiers falsely accused during the Boston Massacre, our eventual enemy on the bloody battlefield.  Before appealing for loyalty and personal sacrifice from British subjects throughout the colonies, the Adamses offered these things first.

And to end where we started, there’s a second crucial distinction between the Trump Show and the Truman Show:  Jim Carrey is genuinely funny.  (We laugh with him, not at him.)  He’s actually the funniest human being I have ever met.  Oh yes I did, Jim.  Monterey, back in the day, on the same bill as Dennis Miller before he became a Clear Channel sellout, yukking it up with O’Leilly.  Remember?  You managed to pretzel your shoulder into your eardrum that night.    ….   Ah, the good ol’ days, when the craziest white man in America was Vanilla Ice.   Ice is nonetheless a far better person than John Roberts.   Ice caused no harm.

 

                                     __________________________________________________

Postscript:  The quote at the beginning is for Lloyd Blankfein, busily doing “God’s work.”

*         =    2/5/2001, The Nation, Greg Palast

**      =     Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals                                                                                                  

***     =    www.swarthmore.edu, Jared Thompson, Esquire   

****   =    I would be remiss in failing to mention another explanation for Iran Contra, from distinguished journalist Robert Parry and bipartisan  NSC confidante Gary Sick, who remind us that George Bush likely traveled to Paris in October 1980, the infamous October Surprise, in order to convince the Iranians to delay release of the hostages until after the election so that Carter would lose.   (A private citizen interfering with the conduct of foreign policy by a sitting president is multiple felonies, beginning with collusion and obstruction.  Treason, basically.)  The hostages were released minutes after the conclusion of Reagan’s inaugural address.  Reagan purportedly returned the favor by secretly shipping TOW and Hawk missiles to Iran through Israel.  …..   Benghazi, btw, supervised by a top trilingual diplomat and about as close to the Levant as you can get without actually being in the Levant     ---   we sure can't use Jerusalem again, and Cairo is a former Syrian ally/parent from the United Arab League   ---   was Iran Contra redux:   Obama-war-whisperer Samantha Power secretly shipping arms to the so-called Syrian opposition, consisting of unemployed civilian personnel.   Those M-16s and grenade launchers are now in the hands of ISIS, particularly after President Trump's military abandonment of the Kurds.    

“It is now very clear that there were two separate agreements, one the official agreement with Carter in Algeria, the other, a secret agreement with another party, which, it is now apparent, was Reagan. They made a deal with Reagan that the hostages should not be released until after Reagan became president. So, then in return, Reagan would give them arms. We have published documents which show that US arms were shipped, via Israel, in March, about 2 months after Reagan became president.”  —  Former Iranian President Abol-hassan Banisadr