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Repairing the Faults in this Nation’s Foundation

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In observance of the Fourth of July holiday, I’ve written a handful of essays for this site over the past five years. One year I wrote two posts, on and before the holiday.

2022: A Republic, If You Can Keep It

2020: Still Dreaming of the American Dream

2020: The Fourth Ahead and the Forgotten

2019: In Order to Form a More Perfect Union

2018: Happy Fourth of July: Remembering the Why

Looking back I realize now writing about the Fourth became imperative because of anti-democratic efforts by Trump and the GOP who enabled his autocratic behaviors.

By exercising our democracy, Trump was removed from office. This is what the nation’s founders envisioned, a leader who could be removed either by election or by impeachment and conviction, when voters revoked and bestowed consent to be governed.

Last year and this year, however, critical faults in the founders’ efforts to create a more perfect union have been revealed, and in a particularly ugly way.

With the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022, a majority of Supreme Court jurists told more than half the nation they did not have bodily autonomy depending on the state they lived in. Equal protection for their fundamental human rights was voided.

This year with the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis decision, a majority of the Supreme Court felt empowered to use a hypothetical case – not an actual case in which any citizens’ rights were violated, and a case which may have relied upon false statements – to sharply turn back the clock on civil rights and weaponize the First Amendment to allow open discrimination.

These unelected arbiters chose to ignore stare decisis, making lies of their sworn statements during nomination hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

GOP-appointed Supreme Court jurists have abrogated their role defined in the Constitution, and have now set about making law in a star chamber created by partisan appointments, in turn enabled by bad faith through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and an Electoral College created to protect a white land-owning minority class in order to assure their white patriarchal power continues.

The only good thing any one of these revanchists has done in the course of seizing Americans’ rights is a warning — surprisingly, by the most corrupt of the lot, Clarence Thomas:

Thomas warned us in Dobbs the extremist revanchist faction of SCOTUS was coming for our right to privacy on which the people of this country have relied to make personal, intimate decisions about their loves and their bodily autonomy.

And lo — this June the revanchists came for LGBTQ+ rights, though not in the way we might have expected. They took a made-up threat to establish a right to exercise in commerce a way to deny LGBTQ+ persons the same access to goods and services. They did so in a way which may allow this country to return to Jim Crow — this time not only seating Blacks at the back of the corporate-owned bus but denying any protected class the equal rights they should have as human beings.

Again, equal protection under the law has been discarded by unelected federal employees with lifetime appointments.

This cannot stand; the problem is bigger than Thomas’s targets, Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

They are going after our unenumerated rights, using enumerated rights to do so.

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Political historian Eli Merritt has an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times: The Fourth of July is all about America’s first principle — the right of revolution.

After the seditious conspiracy and insurrection of January 6, 2021, one might reasonably be put off by the title of this essay. It’s this premise Trump’s seditionists relied upon when they stormed the U.S. Capitol in order to obstruct the certification of the 2020 election, summoning the spirit of 1776 as they did so.

We can’t argue that this country wasn’t born of revolution — it’s fact.

But we can remember as Merritt points out that revolution wasn’t necessarily intended to be violent:

For the founders, the right of revolution did not imply violent overthrow of government. Rather, it was an idea that encompassed the right to resist unconstitutional acts through nonviolent civil disobedience — and, only when this failed after long sufferance, by formal withdrawal from unjust government in the defense of freedom, equality and the right of the people to govern themselves.

The revolution which created this country wasn’t the work of armed rebellion alone beginning 1765 and ending in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. Our fellow contributor Ed Walker has been examining the second founding, which continued the revolution and evolution of this country from a colonial outpost of monarchical empire to an independent, sovereign democratic republic in which equality for all might be realized through amendments to the Constitution.

We’re now confronted with unconstitutional acts by constitutional officers attempting to undo the second founding — specifically, the Ninth Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The right to control our bodies belongs to no state, no nation. No judicial decision should encroach upon that fundamental right.

And yet the Roberts’ SCOTUS conservatives found otherwise with its Dobbs decision, in spite of precedent acknowledging the right to privacy about our bodily autonomy.

The same court puts itself at odds with the Constitution regarding regulating commerce in Creative 303 — if a theoretical business relies on religion to limit its client base, is it really a business or is it a church?

(It’s a wholly dishonest exercise when the business doesn’t even exist; the same Christianist business would be unlikely in reality to win LGBTQ+ business because in reality, clients don’t want hire service providers for work which undermines their lives.)

We are further insulted not only by unconstitutional decisions but by the corruption which shaped them. These are not just works, they are not legitimate; they were generated for corrupt purposes and thwart the evolution toward a more perfect union.

How now are we to respond?

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We must remember once again this Fourth of July that this country has not always ensured all of its people have equality, in spite of its founding manifesto:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The work of the first and second founding are not yet done; we are still and always becoming what we set out to be. Frederick Douglass saw an arc to the path ahead:

…my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. …

We reject that same old path to which the extremist revanchists wish us to return.

We reject their divisive, exclusionary ideology which will not yield a more perfect union.

We may engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to this end; Martin Luther King, Jr. held our feet to the fire in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

MLK told us we have “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

But we should — we must — take every available measure in our democratic framework to revoke our consent and remedy the unconstitutional faults before they fester into worse. This means active engagement in all levels of the democratic political process, from our local school boards to the White House. We can’t take any political office for granted; they are held only with our consent, and our consent is assumed when we are not engaged.

Help new voters obtain ID and register to vote. Ensure they can get to the polls in spite of voter suppression. Educate yourself about the candidates; make sure no seat goes uncontested where a revanchist GOP holds office or runs without opposition. Vote in the primary. Vote up and down the entire ticket — in doing so, you express your consent to be governed.

Do not let them assume you have given consent to an imperfect union, that you consent to their corruption as they take our innate human rights.

I ask once more this holiday as I have before:

I wrote four years ago during the Trump administration, after posting a copy of the Declaration of Independence:

The signatories to this document knew they also signed their death warrant. They debated this document thoroughly, understanding their lives, fortunes, and possibly the same of friends and family were staked on the success of the undertaking launched by this declaration (“corruption of blood” in family’s case, which so concerned the founders it was cited later in the Constitution’s Article III).

They staked blood and treasure for their thoughts and beliefs that the colonies must be free. The least we can do is remember this bravery and consider our own willingness to fight for this American democracy.

When asked in 1787 at the end of the Constitution Convention what form of government had been created, Ben Franklin answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

What will we do to keep it?

What will we do to keep this democratic republic’s foundation from faulting even further?

Three Things: SCOTUS on LGBTQ+ Discrimination, Qualified Immunity, Gun Rights

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Very big SCOTUS day today. Huge — and that’s in spite of the court declining to hear cases on multiple issues.

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In BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY, GEORGIA and two other cases, the Supreme Court ruled in 6-3 decision that firing an employee for being gay or transgender violates the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Title VII (42 USC § 2000e-2 [Section 703]) reads,

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer –

(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

Dissenters were Justices Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito; Alito filed a dissenting opinion which Thomas joined. Kavanaugh also filed a dissenting opinion.

Overview of the three cases from Human Rights Watch:

In R.G. & G.R. HARRIS FUNERAL HOMES v. EEOC and AIMEE STEPHENS, Aimee Stephens worked as a funeral director at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes. When she informed the funeral home’s owner that she is transgender and planned to come to work as the woman she is, the business owner fired her, saying it would be “unacceptable” for her to appear and behave as a woman. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in March 2018 that when the funeral home fired her for being transgender and departing from sex stereotypes, it violated Title VII, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in employment.

In ALTITUDE EXPRESS INC. v. ZARDA, Donald Zarda, a skydiving instructor, was fired from his job because of his sexual orientation. A federal trial court rejected his discrimination claim, saying that the Civil Rights Act does not protect him from losing his job because of his sexual orientation. In February 2018, the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that discrimination based on sexual orientation is a form of discrimination based on sex that is prohibited under Title VII. The court recognized that when a lesbian, gay or bisexual person is treated differently because of discomfort or disapproval that they are attracted to people of the same sex, that’s discrimination based on sex.

In BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY, Gerald Lynn Bostock was fired from his job as a county child welfare services coordinator when his employer learned he is gay. In May 2018, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reconsider a 1979 decision wrongly excluding sexual orientation discrimination from coverage under Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination and denied his appeal.

The dissent weighed in at more than 140 pages out of the entire 177 page syllabus and decision handed down by SCOTUS today.

The first sentence of the dissent:

There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation. The document that the Court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.

Right-wing ideologues are in a furor over Justice Gorsuch’s delivery of the opinion. They must have had absolute faith in Gorsuch to be so incredibly outraged that his interpretation didn’t sustain bigotry. He wrote,

An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

Today’s decision doesn’t end all discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons, only employers defined by Title VII. There is still a need for more legislation to ensure all persons in this country may rely on the same rights in housing, credit, property ownership and more. The House passed the Equality Act in May 2019 to address these shortcomings; the bill is now languishing on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk in spite of support for the bill from 70 percent of Americans.

Steve Silberman noted a trait shared by two of the three dissenting jurists:

One of the most passionately angry voices today:

“Bungled textualism.” ~chuckling~

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The SCOTUS declined to hear cases seeking reexamination of the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” Thomas was the lone jurist who wanted to hear cases; in a six-page dissent he wrote, “qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text.”

There will be greater pressure on lawmakers to address qualified immunity in legislation.

Opinion piece about qualified immunity:

Rep. Ayana Pressley on qualified immunity:

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The SCOTUS declined to hear multiple Second Amendment cases after it avoided addressing New York City’s regulation of guns back in April because the city repeal of the restriction render the case moot.

Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh dissented, wanting to hear a case related to New Jersey’s regulation of concealed carry guns.

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There’s actually four things today — SCOTUS also declined to hear the Trump administration’s petition regarding California’s SB 54 which prevents the state’s law enforcement resources from being deployed to aid federal immigration enforcement. Alito and Thomas dissented, wanting to take up the matter; surprisingly, Kavanaugh voted with Roberts and Gorsuch to decline.

We are still waiting for a decision on Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals policy (DACA), which could cost the U.S. as many as 27,000 health care workers at the worst time possible if SCOTUS finds DACA unconstitutional.

This is an open thread.