The fan is being hit fast and furiously these days. Joe Lieberman’s gift to the nation-a right wing Supreme Court, has announced itself with force over the last couple of days. Corporate free speech good, student free speech, bad. Corporations good, environment bad. Institutionalized religion good, taxpayer standing bad.
What’s interesting is the degree to which the hard right judges are showing their true colors. The plurality opinion in the student free speech case allowed that students have some free speech rights, just not when they’re saying something that might be interpreted as being pro-drugs. You can look it up, there’s an asterisk in the First Amendment that makes an exception for that. But Clarence Thomas was having none of it. No half way measures for him:
In sort, in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power of ideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order.
Long and short: no free speech rights for students, according to Thomas. Case closed. Yes, that’s right, Clarence Thomas elevated 18th century educational practices to the status of legal precedent in a constitutional case.
In the long run, the case that may cause the most harm involved a suit by taxpayers against the Bush Administration’s giveaways to religious groups. The court said that atheist and agnostic taxpayers lacked standing to “sue to stop conferences that help religious charities apply for federal grants”.
Taxpayer standing often represents the only effective check on unconstitutional activities by the government. Once again, the court plurality opted to neuter the legal principle rather than kill it, but that was not good enough for Scalia (joined by Thomas):
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would have gone further that the rest of the court, favoring a repudiation of the 1968 decision that in certain instances allows taxpayer lawsuits.
”We had an opportunity today to erase this blot on our jurisprudence, but instead have simply smudged it,” Scalia wrote.
No doubt Big Tony will have many more chances to deprive ordinary citizens of redress in the courts. They’re in charge now. We are about to see the most activist court in American history, but it won’t be covered that way. Somehow restricting the rights of the American people doesn’t qualify as activism.
I’m waiting, by the way, for Clarence Thomas to call for the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. After all, segregated schools were universal in the good old days, so they must also be constitutional.
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