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How to dismember the court and a few other rogues

The Court has done it again, this time blocking OSHA, the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, from requiring companies to help stop the spread and protect employees from Covid, a mere disease.

When I talk about law you’d expect the floor to be covered with split hairs. BUT can I let you decide just how firmly my tongue is or should be planted in my check, or whether I’m suggesting some outrageous but potentially effective remedies?

Republican extremists pick and choose what Constitutional provisions count – 2nd Amendment good, 14th Amendment bad. Their White Supremacist supporters condemn and try to eliminate those they call “Fourteenth Amendment citizens” – Black and Brown people who would not have been treated as citizens of the seceding states before the Civil War and Fourteenth Amendment. That Amendment, ratified shortly after the Civil War, was designed to make them citizens put equal protection and due process into the Constitution. But violent and lawless Trump-inspired white supremacists are still fighting the Civil War on the traitors’ side.

Republican judges maul the Constitution with claims that only “express” language counts and principles don’t. They deny that a woman has a right to control her own body because the Constitution doesn’t use those exact words. So let them die by their own rules. The Constitution doesn’t say they have to be offered Covid vaccines or hospital care. Why waste it on them? The Constitution says the members of the Supreme Court are there for life, but it says nothing about their building, budget, staff, offices, electricity, equipment or files – so why not burn or turn it off and reassign staff elsewhere where they can do more good. Let the Court function naked. And let’s put up barricades so nobody can get to them. The Constitution doesn’t say courts have to have entrances or members of the Court can’t be deported and denied passports.

The Constitution doesn’t say it’s OK to disenfranchise Democrats, but the Red states are doing it anyway. So perhaps it’s time to refuse to count votes collected or reported by states that disenfranchise Democrats or fail to count their votes. And it’s time for Blue states to gerrymander every Republican extremist in their midst out of Congress. Apparently in politics, like war, anything goes. So deport them, preferably to Haiti or Honduras. Bye.

Or instead we could retroactively accept the secession of the Confederate states. It’s going to be too hot to live there soon enough. So let’s “vet” and exclude the dangerous or disloyal before letting refugees in from former Confederate states.

People are disappointed Biden hasn’t stopped the pandemic. The Feds helped produce and then approved three different vaccines and figured out that masks help prevent the spread but heaven forbid the Administration use its power to make us cooperate. No, no – cooperation would be un-American.

Most important of all, folks, plan to keep voting – whether you look at voting as self-defense, habit, civic duty or a chance to socialize with your neighbors at the polls, politics is a marathon and we need to keep showing up.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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