Eight years ago the Supreme Court ruled that one man’s right to equal protection was more important than the votes of the mass of voters in Florida, or at least the ones that weren’t counted. They would claim, I’m sure, that the fact that the man in question was George Bush was purely coincidental. Since then Scalia has told us all to get over it, something he has never said to the folks who insist that Roe v Wade was wrongly decided. Yesterday the court decided, as informed observers knew they would, that the the poor and the elderly were not entitled to the same protection as George Bush-not by a long shot. Despite the fact that there is no evidence of vote fraud, even on a trifling scale, the court upheld a photo identification law that was consciously designed to prevent the poor and the elderly from voting.
What does this prove? Does it prove that a court that once took pride in protecting the disenfranchised has become the agent of a political party? To anyone with sense it does. But Hans von Spakovsky, the man who led the voter suppression drive at the Justice Department sees it differently:
“This decision not only confirms the validity of photo ID laws, but it completely vindicates the Bush Justice Department and refutes those critics who claimed that the department somehow acted improperly when it approved Georgia’s photo ID law in 2005,” said Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a former Justice Department official.
What a deal for Bush. He and his party are able to launder their criminality and constitution abuse through a Supreme Court, the members of whom were picked precisely because they promised to perform that very task at the time of their appointments. We have six John Yoos on the Supreme Court Bench, or, more precisely five John Yoos and one delusional justice who falls off the rails every once in a while. But they only need five, and they’ve got them.
I suppose when the Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case there were slave owners who felt they’d been vindicated. We as a country are now reaping the fruits of our own insistence that electoral choices should be made in line with what our media tells us is important: pledges of allegiance, flag pins, rides in tanks, trips to Russia, preacher’s sermons, and bowling scores. Since 1980 at the very least, the most important domestic issue in each election has been judicial appointments. The Republican party has perceived the judicial nomination process as part of their war on democracy; simply another front in their battle to take and hold power by whatever means necessary. They have appointed judges that are co-conspirators in the process, “intellectuals” that provide a paper thin veneer over these naked power grabs.
If Obama gets elected that court will frustrate him at every turn.