Roberts court slams country into reverse
Conservative Christians display a penchant for leaning more heavily for guidance on the pre-Jesus sections of their Bibles than on the gospels and the New Testament. Something about smiting enemies and sending them to the place of eternal torment holds greater appeal than admonitions to love them and to care for the poor and immigrants. Given the unholy alliance between between conservative politics and conservative Christianity, it is no surprise that right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court prefer to read the Constitution the way evangelicals read the scriptures. That is, selectively, and with a preference for American mores and jurisprudence of the nintheenth century. When men were men and all others were second-class citizens, if not property.
Adam Serwer recently dubbed this approach “undead constitutionalism.” The Roberts court’s primary role, he writes:
… is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country. The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along.
That is, the court interprets the Constitution the way fundamentalists interpret the Bible. They bring their preconceived notions to it and search out justifcation in the text, primarily the Old Testament. Conspiracy theorists do the same in compiling “evidence” to support their beliefs. The quality of constitutional reasoning behind recent court majority decisions is as that of a preacher deriving hitherto undiscovered eternal truths by hopscotching through a concordance as, Jennifer Rubin suggests in the Dobbs case, the court does through American history (Washington Post):
The right-wing court wants to lock 21st-century America into the Founders’ world or, at the latest, the late 19th century, conveniently skipping past the parts of history that disfavor its cramped view of individual rights. Women, minorities, gay people and others once had little political, economic or social power. And so they will again, if the court gets its way.
Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform famously declared his wish to roll back the 20th century to the Gilded Age of William McKinley. Not far enough, the court majority believes. In this, economic conservatives and cultural conservatives are in complete agreement. The Roberts court is their vehicle for fulfillment of that retrograde dream. They just slammed the country into reverse.
Dissenters in Dobbs scold:
Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today. Because those laws prevented women from charting the course of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same again. Because in 1868, the government could tell a pregnant woman — even in the first days of her pregnancy — that she could do nothing but bear a child, it can once more impose that command.
“This is a party of radicalism, of contempt for the modern America in which White males do not get to make all the rules,” Rubin continues. “It’s a view of democracy akin to right-wing authoritarian regimes where elections (sort of) are held but individual liberty and human rights have no guarantee, given few constraints on government power.”
“The D is for drive forward. The R is for reverse,” Jennifer Granholm told the Democrats’ convention in 2012. She wasn’t exaggerating.
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