Supreme Court Votes for Mass Unemployment and War with Iran
Over the past 22 years, the United
States Supreme Court has made half a dozen decisions that have significantly diminished
the power of voters and markedly increased the power of parties and
corporations to decide elections.
In 1988, in Burdick v. Takushi, the Court ruled that
voters do not have a right to contested elections. The issue involved a resident of Hawaii who
went to vote and found only one name on the ballot. Asked how he could “write-in” he was told he
couldn’t. Going to court and winning on
the appellate level, it was reversed by the Supreme Court on essentially
procedural grounds. No one could figure
out whether the ban against “write-in” voting was administrative or statutory,
so the voter was out of luck. The
Supreme Court had a three part test for intervening in a state election
dispute. Burdick v. Takushi did not meet it, so it
reversed the appellate decision. More
than that, it ruled that the state’s procedures for getting on the ballot were
good enough, no need for a last minute escape clause in case of a death or
unexpected event between the filing deadline and the election. Lisa Murkowski’s victory in Alaska could not
have happened in Hawaii.
The next blow to democracy came in
1998 in Arkansas Educational Television
Network v. Forbes. Ralph Forbes was
an independent candidate for Congress in Arkansas’s Third District when he was
prevented from participating in a candidates’ debate sponsored by the publicly
funded Arkansas Educational Television Network. This happened in 1992 when
Governor William Jefferson Clinton, from Arkansas, was running for president of
United States. In the end, the Supreme Court ruled that publicly funded
broadcasters had the same editorial rights as private broadcasters and could use
their discretion in covering the news to exclude an independent candidate who
was only polling 2.5%. This decision, in
effect, meant that the voters who signed Forbes’ nominating petition had their
taxes used to prevent the candidate they supported from being heard. This is a
clear violation of the First Amendment.
Government action was denying Forbes his freedom of speech while
promoting that of his Republican and Democratic rivals. The premise of the
decision is absurd. It says,
essentially, all that matters is who wins.
If a candidate can’t win, then they need not be heard. This prevents new ideas and perspectives from
entering the debate and is one reason why there are no new ideas available to
help the country emerge from its current economic crisis. Even though Republicans and Democrats
combined are less than half the electorate, the reason Republicans and
Democrats are almost 100% of the elected officials is because the electoral
system is stacked in their favor by Supreme Court decisions like this.
The
third catastrophic decision came early in 2000 in California Democratic Party v. Jones. In 1996, California voters passed a question
to create open primaries in California.
An open primary is one in which any voter can vote in any primary regardless
of party registration. The Court ruled
that parties, let me repeat that, parties have a first amendment right to
freedom of association and therefore holding a primary in which any voter can
vote violates the party’s first amendment rights. Please note, in Burdick v. Takushi the court sanctioned
single candidate elections. In Arkansas Educational Television Network v.
Forbes, it ruled that governments can deny first amendment free speech
rights to independent candidates. Now, it gives parties first amendment
rights.
These
three decisions markedly strengthen the two-party system. If asked, its defenders will say that the
two-party system promotes “stability” in contrast to parliamentary systems with
their unstable and coalition governments.
The problem with this argument is that parties are not mentioned in the
Constitution. Furthermore, prescribing
party power destroys the secrecy of the ballot.
In order to vote in a primary, voters must publicly declare their party
affiliation. This is why voter turnout
in primaries is so low. In effect, the
two-party system puts the nomination of candidates into the hands of small
groups of people who are willing to publicly declare their political
affiliation, and then voters who value their secret ballots are allowed to
choose between the two fringe candidates nominated by both parties. If voters do not like the Republican or
Democrat, too bad, the independent will not be covered, and there may not be a
write-in option even with one candidate, or a dead candidate, on the
ballot. This is one reason for the
gridlock in Washington. The people who
elect the winner in November are completely different from the voters who
nominate them in the primary.
The
fourth decision was Bush v. Gore, in
which the court elected the loser by ignoring all the intervention standards it
used in Burdick v. Takushi. Here the court misused deadlines to prevent
the will of the voters from being ascertained.
Bush was elected by not counting the votes; is it any wonder that the nation
is at war and in an economic collapse.
These were predictable consequences of the flawed 2000 election. All corrupt elections yield similar
government policies. Elections decided
by small appointed bodies in clear opposition to the express will of the voters
(Gore won by over 538,000 votes) are not democratic elections. But then again, ruling elites often do not
support democracy.
The fifth decision was Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 07- 21, and
Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, 07-25 in 2008
which upheld Indiana’s strict picture voter identification law. This law, passed on strictly party lines, is
a bald faced attempt to discourage voting by poorer, less educated voters by
requiring them to bring picture identification to the polls when they
vote. Even though the plaintiffs in this
case could not cite a single example of a fraudulent vote in Indiana, the
Republicans continually allege ineligible voting to justify procedures that
discourage legitimate voters from casting ballots. It is important to remember that voters are
required to present identification when they register originally, and every
time they vote, they are required to sign their names twice. The poll worker then examines their signature
and compares it to the signature obtained when the voter originally
registered. Yet, the Supreme Court
accepted the argument, when not a single example of fraudulent voting was
presented. Justice Stevens, in his
opinion, had to go back to the 1860’s and New York’s Tammany Hall elections to
justify photo identification in Indiana in the 21st century. In New Jersey, for example, the Republican
Party was under Justice Department monitoring for fielding “ballot security
squads” in low income neighborhoods that intimidated voters from casting
ballots. These incidents occurred in
1981, when Tom Kean won his squeaker victory over Jim Florio. Furthermore, in a nation where voter turnout
is declining, where tens of millions of eligible voters do not bother to cast
ballots, does anyone seriously think that ineligible people are flocking to the
polls to cast fraudulent ballots. The idea is risible. But the Supreme Court is not interested in
truth or reality, it is interested in crafting laws
for partisan advantage of the majority of justices who do not support the
Constitution nor democracy. And they are
called “strict constructionists.” The
late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, is alleged to have
gotten his start in politics intimidating Hispanic voters in his native
Arizona.
And
finally, this year, in Citizens United v.
Federal Communications Commission the Supreme Court ruled that corporations
have unlimited power to spend money on elections, it’s their first amendment
right to freedom of speech. Remember,
voters do not have that right, voters can go into the
voting booth and be faced with only one candidate on the ballot and no right to
write-in. [Think of voting, making a choice between candidates, as a form of
expression or speech.] If they sign a petition to nominate an independent
candidate, that candidate can have its first amendment right to be heard
quashed at public expense. But now
corporations that can not be drafted to fight, or risk their lives in
Afghanistan, that can never die and if they become unemployed it does not
matter, they don’t even live in houses, eat food, or need health care; they
have greater rights to freedom of speech than human beings. Also, corporations were created for specific
purposes: to run railroads, build cars, make drugs. Now they Supreme Court has
given them all license to be political action committees in addition.
Is there a consistent legal doctrine
that explains all these decisions?
Indeed there is. It is the
doctrine that the Supreme Court makes whatever decision is necessary to
increase its own power over elections.
To increase its own power it has to emasculate the power of the
voters. Every one of its decisions
decreased the power of individual voters and, either directly or indirectly,
increased the court’s power over elections.
The
reason for this is that all the Supreme Court justices are lawyers. Lawyers are trained to win at all costs. That’s what is happening at the moment. Every law, every case, every decision
increases the power of the lawyers, regardless of the consequences to the
voters, to the economy, to national security, to anything.
So,
having elected Bush and set the government on a course of war and economic
collapse, the voters rebelled and elected the Democrats to Congress in 2006 and
Barack Obama in 2008. Not to be
thwarted, the Supreme Court liberated the corporations by overturning a century
of law designed to curb the undue influence of money in politics. The result was that the Republicans regained
the House of Representatives on a tidal wave of corporate cash.
These
geniuses think that a big economic meltdown will make people look longingly at
a war with Iran to “get us out of this economic mess.” The received wisdom of wars curing economic
ills based on the unique case of World War II has been proved wrong in World
War I, Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, preconceived notions die hard.
The Supreme Court has voted
for mass unemployment and war with Iran.
In truth, either one of those events will be a disaster for the United
States. But as long as the nine justices
have jobs, they could care less about the consequences of their decisions. What the court is really doing is laying the
groundwork for civil disorder by making peaceful change through a democratic
political process impossible.
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