Our venerable 18th-century Founders, while prescient, could not have anticipated the current infestation of termite-like damage to the underpinnings of the edifice of their creatively constructed radical Democratic Republic. The tripartite design of its political architecture, each branch having requisite authority over the others, to assure the Nation’s proper governance, to achieve the intended “government, “By and for the People.” Empirical assurance of such constitutional democracy was afforded by the invested authority of the Judiciary branch, the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court of the United States (“SCOTUS”) was granted the ultimate authority to review and determine all issues arising, relevant to the proper stewardship of our constitutional Republic. Such assurance of constitutional propriety, dynamically supplemental to a mutual “Checks and Balances” authority of the three branches of the polity (“Separation of Powers”), was construed as a dynamically empirical guarantee of the stability of an intended “government,” by and for the People.”
The advent of a constitutional debacle, the proximate consequence of influential, wealthy, self-interested citizens in their excessive desire for power and further material riches, was not then temporally considered nor conceivable.
Until the unfortunate precedent-altering case of Gore v Bush (2000), the Supreme Court was the empirical cause for the consummate assurance, through its assigned responsibility of “Judicial Review,” of compliance with the provisions of the Constitution. Consistent with the basic concept of “Separation of Powers, any litigant aspiring to have his case accepted for determination by SCOTUS was mandated to present an application, known as a “Writ of Certiorari,” successfully demonstrating that the issues of the relevant case are not political nor have any indirect political resonance. The mandated proscription of politically impactful matters proved to be successful in the traditional maintenance of judicial objectivity, confining the determinations and findings of the ultimate Court of last (final) resort to its laudable duty of the objective determination of material legal issues.
The\ turning point represented by the Supreme Court’s acceptance and determination of the “political” case of Gore v. Bush proved to represent the morphing of a SCOTUS, unprecedentedly, to a judicial body, regrettably open to political influence, and shockingly, to instances of individual judicial corruption.
The politically infamous Taxpayer United case, erroneously accepted and determined by SCOTUS, in our view, opened the floodgates to a sustained mortal attack on democracy. The Court promulgated the anti-democratic proposition that a corporation may not be legally limited as to its political contributions. Money in politics has historically been the arch-enemy of democratic equality in its toxic impact on the significance of the individual citizen’s vote. The ensuing, profound distress at its profoundly negative impact on the democratic standard of the equal vote is only surpassed by its telling, sophomoric rationalization.
The High Court, in that unfortunate case, ruled that a corporation is a legal “person” and, accordingly, statutory limitations on corporate political contributions were an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech. Such evident stretch of reason and the plain inanity of the Court’s reasoning are demonstrative of the corrupt insincerity of the presiding Court. First-year law school freshman and every entrepreneur is aware that the statutorily created ability for a fictional status of”person” is solely related to a business entityvehicle of (having its origin in the time of Queen Elizabeth) that merely confers the requested status of a legally fictional “personhood” to corporate business entities, for the limited purpose of thereby limiting the individual liability of the entrepreneur ( N.B. debtors went to prison in Elizabethan England) and thereby encouraging new enterprise. The cocept is universally understood not to represent humanity.
Since every law school freshman and business entrepreneur is aware of the routine and statutorily permissible use of the vehicle of a fictional “person” in the context of corporate business, it is manifestly ineluctable that the eminent justices of SCOTUS, indeed, know it as well. This flagrant gift to the well-healed and influential corporate world constituted a mortal blow to the existential one-man, one-vote dynamic of our traditionally vaunted definitional democracy, and is sadly demonstrative of the decline of our Highest Court.
Rather than the designated existence and availability of an ultimate Court constituted for the rendition of just constitutional guidance, SCOTUS has thus tragically descended to the level of an unpredictable (and worse, corrupted) overseer of legal rectitude. The unpredictable acceptance of the influence of individuals, characterized by the collaboration of riches and influence, empirically led to the institutional decline of the High Court, and opportunistically availed the donors of the novel opportunity remunerative and otherwise, to manage Justices open to political and religious influence.
[ N.B. excluded from this reluctant critique are Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. The latter three Justices are demonstrably and admirably unwavering in their moral and principled dedication to constitutional rectitude, but unfortunately, are numerically outvoted by the other principally vulnerable SOCUS Justices.]
A traditional Supreme Court, evincing Justices emulating the venerable record of their traditionally venerable predecessors, would be a determinative buffer against the errant and outrageously un-American, autocratic policies of the extant shameful and dystopian Chief Executive and his menagerie of sycophantic followers.
-p.
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