Americans can forgive ourselves for having been taken by surprise by the Supreme Court's ruling thirteen years ago in Bush v. Gore (2000): The case was precipitated by an extremely unlikely statistical tie in Florida presidential voting, and not all of the Justices in the majority were considered right-wing ideologues. Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor were in fact considered moderates up to that point, and it was presumed or at least modestly hoped that their rulings would coincide reasonably well with the law and common sense. But when the Court went full-on Animal Farm and ruled that the State of Florida must stop counting votes and declare George W. Bush the winner because any outcome other him in the White House would violate his Equal Protection rights, America got a glimpse of the future.
I won't belabor history with the litany of George W. Bush's atrocities that followed: Such an account would rival the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in length, depravity, and misery, since every petulant smear, compulsive lie, careless crime, and arrogant alternate-universe propaganda machination is still clear in the record; every inhuman act of mass-murder, torture, robbery, and malign negligence is still ripe with the stench of the dead and lives destroyed. It was a nearly decade-long period of unmitigated destruction, savagery, sadism, murder, Big Lies on the order of Pravda, and inhumanity verging on animalistic, and it all came down to that one lawless, arbitrary Supreme Court decision.
While we can expound on the role played by the State government of Florida in disenfranchising voters in 2000, the role of Al Gore in running a "lackluster" campaign, the role of Ralph Nader in foolishly convincing so many people to vote against their best interests for the sake of a symbolic stand, and the self-immolating despicability of an American public that rewarded the peace and prosperity of the Clinton administration with apathy and contempt, ultimately the path taken by this country after the year 2000 came down to the five Justices in the majority opinion on Bush v. Gore: William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and as mentioned before, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor.
Sometimes in history the world squeaks by with only a hair's breadth of clearance. This was not one of those times: This was one of those times where it almost...just...nearly made it...but didn't. Something like a million people were violently slaughtered (we still don't have a remotely accurate body count of the primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. casualties), an entire country broken to rubble, a great American city left to rot underwater, and the world's largest economy disemboweled because of that one lawless decision. We couldn't have seen it coming, that much is true: There were just too many thresholds being simultaneously approached, too many corners being rounded at once. But let us never excuse ourselves that anything that happened afterward was beyond our control.
Bush and his associates had long since revealed themselves for what they were during the course of the campaign, and now the majority on the Supreme Court had revealed itself to be part of the same phenomenon. To the minor credit of the American people, the response was not total silence: There were sizable protests. But they were idle acts of self-expression rather than signs of determination - they were, in essence, merely requests that the will of the people and the fact of the law be respected rather than declarative statements that they would be enforced. This was the vast chasm of willpower that separated the citizenry from the arrogant monsters who had seized control over the nation via Bush v. Gore: Americans were still living in a pre-Millennial dream world where democracy was a game of idle opinions rather than a physical process of necessities with real lives on the line. They saw the foul, cried "No fair!", waved some signs, and then went home as if the game was over and nothing of consequence would happen for another couple of years.
Well, we deserved what we got, didn't we? Just about everyone had their weakness and frivolity as citizens put on display by the events that followed: The Bush voters for selling their country for a tax cut and being distracted by trivial sex scandals; the Naderites for being so shallow that they cared more about the centrist form of Al Gore's campaign than the deep differences between the candidates; Floridians for being flummoxed by a ballot that, let's be honest, really wasn't that hard to figure out; the American people in general for treating a referendum on eight years of peace, prosperity, and progress as a personality contest, and actually allowing an idiot-psychopath to achieve credible standing let alone come within arm's reach of victory; the media for being the lying, despicably partisan Republican trash they've been ever since; Al Gore, for accepting the coup "gracefully" simply because he was told to, putting his comfortable position ahead of the needs of the country; and we liberals, because we waved our signs until the urge passed and then went home with a sigh rather than shutting this country down until a real election was had, whatever the outcome.
What other people die and have died for, we would not even have missed a football game to defend, and so it was no surprise - though certainly no less of a disgrace - that there was also no attempt to impeach the Justices responsible for Bush v. Gore. Let's be honest here: They committed treason. They nakedly abused their position on the Court to interfere in an election on behalf of their partisan choice for President, completely ignoring the law, countermanding the will of the American people, cutting short the attempt to find the will of the people of Florida, and inflicting the next eight years of tyranny on this country and the world just because they could. If there were to have been, or even is in the future, accountability for the crimes of George W. Bush, undoubtedly the surviving Justices in the Bush v. Gore majority will have to answer for their actions in installing him in power.
But that doesn't matter right now, because at the time we did nothing to hold them accountable - not even rhetorically. We shrugged at a coup d'etat and the laughable Kangaroo Court finding that enabled it, which was so devoid of legality and accepted law doctrines that despite being one of the most significant cases in the history of the world, it still hasn't been incorporated into the accepted canon of US law. In fact, in thirteen years, no other judge has cited it except Clarence Thomas himself this year. Well, there is no statute of limitations on impeachment, and three of the Justices in the Bush v. Gore majority are still on the Court, so if they're going to start dredging up that heinous shit and pretending it's a legitimate basis for further rulings, I'm calling Bush v. Gore Count 1 of the impeachment indictment against those three: Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy.
We had an election in 2000 to determine the President who would fill one or two seats on the Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice, and that person was Al Gore. Those three Justices overturned the election, and as a result, determined that today we would still be suffering under a conservative Court majority - one that will last a very long time due to the relatively young ages of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. If you have any regret whatsoever that we didn't stand up back then when our country was being seized and its future gutted, at least recognize that today we are still being attacked by this same vestige and handmaiden of that regime. Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy still spit in the face of the Constitution and the republic whenever fundamental matters come before the bench bearing directly on the outcomes of elections, and still rule arbitrarily in favor of the Republican Party's all-consuming desire to rule over the American people's right to be governed by whom we choose.
If there is nothing else you can get worked up about, and no other obligation you accept, at least accept that we all still bear the responsibility for allowing the horrors of the Bush regime to happen. All of us. The people of Iraq cannot be un-murdered; the victims of torture cannot have their physical and psychological scars magically erased; the trillions of dollars obliterated from the US economy by that regime and its cronies cannot be miracled back into existence overnight, even if we finally manage to right the wrongs of our regressivized tax system; and none of the people who have suffered secondarily because of all these crimes and disasters will have their wrongs righted except by time. Moreover, so long as they personally are not in the government, George W. Bush and the key figures of his regime will never be considered worth the political headache (if not civil war) of prosecuting. But...
...There is one key vestige still in power that isn't part of any bureaucracy: Three people who put Bush in power, who set the stage for the continuation of the conservative Court majority, and have continued to issue lawless rulings undermining the foundations of American democracy ever since. If we accept our responsibility for the horrors of the Bush regime, then we are obligated to finally address them at the very least by throwing those three Justices off the Supreme Court, no matter how high the obstacles or how long the process. Because we will have plenty of time to enjoy their abuses of power if we fail to try, even after they personally leave: We will experience their legacy in the other two Justices they caused to be put on the Court, Alito and Roberts, and in the next few Justices that replace them personally when they retire under Republican Presidents whom their own lawless rulings have given the advantage in elections through legalizing bribery, gerrymandering, racial discrimination, and all other imaginable Republican fuckery.
If you have any lingering sense of responsibility for what George W. Bush did to this country and the world, then you must support impeaching those three Justices for what they did in Bush v. Gore, even if you ignore everything that has followed and everything that will follow in our future because of it. They have already brazenly overturned your vote without consequences of any kind to them, and they will do it again without hesitation if the same or similar situation presents itself. So for your own dignity as Americans, for the people of Iraq whose murders they enabled by shepherding the coup that installed their murderer, for the tortured, and basically for all of us whose country has been raped in every way, shape, and form by the Republican Party ever since then, you owe this most basic stand: That those three Justices be impeached for that act of judicial tyranny. That time does not heal wounds that deep, let alone when they still sit on the Supreme Court as if they had any right to be deciding matters of law in this country.
But the right-wing core of this oligarchy was not finished with Bush v. Gore - far from it. With the additions of Roberts and Alito guaranteed by their own lawless appointment of a President, these Justices have systematically moved to dismantle American democracy and rule of law from the bench. How is it that Republican House candidates can get fewer votes than Democrats and still maintain a majority? Because the Supreme Court sustained their gerrymandering, which in practice at these extremes is no different from election-rigging: Republicans have been allowed to choose their own electorates while still controlling finite proportions of government institutions - proportions that bear increasingly little resemblance to how the American people vote. And this in a body that is both constitutionally and philosophically supposed be representative of the people.
So they were not content to overturn your vote for President, but have interfered in legislatures on both the state and federal levels. Have you wondered how it is that Blue states with highly unionized economies and strong Democratic foundations have now found themselves in the hands of solid Republican majorities that are systematically de-unionizing everything, dishing out ALEC legislation at break-neck speed, dismantling basic civil and constitutional rights, and creating little third-world fiefdoms out of what once were economic and cultural powerhouses of this country? Yes, ALEC and its Koch masters have a lot of money, but that's not the root of it. The root of it is naked gerrymandering that's been sustained by the courts - which is basically to say that Republicans were allowed to build castle walls around their strongholds while Democrats were selectively denied the same advantages, so they were systematically attacked and their seats taken by hook or by crook.
Still, the American people are resilient and creative: We surged forward in 2008 by using the internet and mobile phones to raise unprecedented amounts of money for Democratic candidates through small donations while the GOP remained hemmed in by campaign finance restrictions, and as a result our Party sailed to massive victories nationwide on both the federal and state levels. To say that Republicans were shocked would be an understatement - they knew there would be a pushback due to the economy and eight years of hell they had put the country through, but the involvement of technology and a charismatic candidate at the head of the ticket brought in results that terrified and enraged them. And what do Republicans do when America isn't obeying them? They call the Supreme Court.
Almost two months to the day after Barack Obama took office, the Supreme Court heard the first arguments in the doublespeak-titled Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case. Two years and one day after Obama's inauguration, the Court issued its ruling reaching back into the hoary depths of 19th century Constitutional law to find that (a)corporations are people, (b)money is speech, and (c)those inconvenient campaign finance laws that had so hindered Republicans in 2008 were now kaput. In essence, they ruled that bribery was not only legal both to give and receive, but Constitutionally-protected free speech, and a legal fiction that had until then only lurked around the edges was now made manifest: The Corporate Person - that Lovecraftian horror of collective greed made tangible and given rights equal to if not exceeding that of the human being.
Normally campaign finance cases were treated narrowly by the courts, but out of the blue (I wonder why!) the Roberts Court decided to go as broad as possible and basically address the entire system of campaign finance laws as they'd evolved under McCain-Feingold. Rather than tolerating college students and retirees being able to collectively outspend Goldman-Sachs on US elections, this Supreme Court reinvented the definition of human and legalized bribery! They single-handedly turned Congress from a place where corruption was rampant to a place where corruption was the only activity, now redefined as a legitimate exchange of "speech" in the form of proverbial suitcases full of cash. All because the outcome of the 2008 election simply could not be allowed to happen again: That is how criminally insane this Supreme Court majority is, and how utterly determined they are to guarantee that you never be allowed to determine the outcome of an election again.
And boy were they successful in 2010 - the Citizens United ruling came just in time for Republicans to create their own alternate universe out of all their media buys: A bubble of utter fiction and lies full of Communist Death Panels, Wars on Christmas, Kenyan Black Helicopters coming to pollute your precious God-fearing American bodily fluids, fantasy scandals and paranoia word-salad filling every pore and orifice. And while none of it came even close to touching Barack Obama, the run-of-the-mill Democratic politicians of the House and Senate had no chance before the coordinated nationwide propaganda onslaught. I'm sure Democrats would have lost seats in 2010 even in a totally fair fight - 2008 was after all a clean-sweep - but there is no way in high hell that the GOP could have achieved what it did without Citizens United.
I warned as early as September of 2009 that determining the outcome of the 2010 election was the purpose of the case, and the Court did not disappoint. I'm not entirely sure how correct my predictions were, but I'm afraid "very" might prove accurate before history is done with this era:
If five people, all of whom were appointed by Republicans, issue a ruling saying that a corporation is a person and has more rights than the American people; if that decision floods the Republican Party with money after the American people marginalized them at the ballot box, and hands them dominion over our government after We The People took it from them; if that decision dictates the outcome of the next election, and the voice of the people is drowned out by corporate propaganda; I do not see a way out of civil war. And if that occurred, it would not be the side-show "war" that mere right-wing militia terrorism would create: It would be the full-scale leveraging of the American media, financial institutions, significant elements of the military, private armies, and the teabaggers and militia nuts against the weakened republic.
You tell me how close I was in that prediction to a world where Republican state-level dictators like Scott Walker are running their own little armed kingdoms, the most trivial and weakest of possible gun control laws supported by 90% of the American people can't pass the Senate, Republicans hold the American economy hostage at every opportunity with an unelected majority, and budgets nationwide have to be gutted because the 0.0001% are parking tens of trillions of dollars in offshore banks to avoid paying what little in taxes we would demand of them anyway. That is the situation this Supreme Court has sown, both as an ongoing legacy of Bush, and the direct harvest of the Citizens United coup. They reversed your vote in 2000, and when you shocked them in 2008, they reversed most of that too in 2010.
But we were still resilient in 2012, despite the gerrymandering/rigging, legalized corruption, and the granting of superhuman rights to corporations so that they could propagandize the nation into an alternate universe. They really thought it was enough, so one of their true masters - a billionaire of the Inner Party, Mitt Romney - took the stage to claim his "rightful" place as our ruler, much as George W. Bush did in 2000. They reunited the old band, including Karl Rove, and planned on basically reinstituting the regime as if nothing had happened: The casual lying and sadistic degradation of ordinary people we saw on a regular basis from the Romney campaign would have been multiplied and faceted a millionfold through the kaleidoscope of the federal government, and it would be as if Bush had never left. Don't doubt for a moment they thought this was going to happen: The Inner Party doesn't spend its own money like that unless they expect a return.
And why wouldn't they expect it? They had it all sewn up: A gerrymandered and bought-and-paid for Congress; the media completely in their pocket, literally owned and operated by them; an economy they themselves had made stagnant by obstructing all further progress following their 2010 sweep; Tea Party brownshirts on the ground spreading lies and hate and helping them interfere in the electoral process wherever possible; Republican state governments screwing with voting hours and introducing unnecessary obstacles to voting so that minorities were forced to wait in long lines while typical Republican voters could breeze through the voting process. It should have worked - in fact, would have worked under normal paradigms of politics. It would have worked in 2000 or 2004, and might even have done the trick in 2008 under similar circumstances.
But the demographics had not merely spiked: They had fundamentally shifted. African-Americans and Latinos were now in the game permanently, and Mitt Romney went down in flames as the massive Fail-burger he deserved to be. The look on his face and on the faces of his Inner sanctum said it all: They truly, sincerely were not expecting it. Maybe all the post-game analysis is right and they simply talked themselves into believing their own bullshit, but I think they had every reason to be confident, for all the stated reasons and more. If it came down to a tie like 2000, it was 100% certain the Supreme Court would make up whatever rationale was necessary to rule in their favor. Everything about the election except the electorate said they were going to win, and no self-respecting Republican was going to let a little thing like that stand in their way. But we didn't give them a choice. There were just "too many" blacks, "too many" Latinos - the usual suppression tactics were not keeping them away.
We humiliated one of the GOP's Masters - one of the very few people the Party exists to serve: One of the worshiped ultra-wealthy, the Ubermenschen, the Job Creators, the Life Givers, the people whom any other Republican feels honored just to grovel at their feet and eat their shit. They were sobbing not over a lost election, but over the sight of one of their gods being toppled: Not Mitt Romney personally, but Money. All the highly-paid corporate cubicle rats, all the planted media stories, all the Supreme Court decisions designed to prepare to hand him a unified Republican government with a bow on it...and there he stood with his beady little eyes glaring, looking about ready to chew off his own face, and stormed off before instantly cutting off his campaign credit cards and stranding all his henchmen wherever they happened to be in the world before they could even catch cabs or check out of their hotel rooms. It was glorious.
But, once again, what do Republicans do when Americans disobey them at the polls? They call the Supreme Court. SCOTUS to Republicans is like Veruca Salt's Daddy, and they come calling like clockwork whenever they lose an election: If not to overturn the results directly, then to impose some outrageous new obstacle they hope will swing things their way next time. When small donors proved decisive in 2008, they totally rewrote the very foundations of American election law to negate the Democratic advantage that trounced them, and as a result, 2010 was theirs. Just two days after Obama won reelection through the decisive demographic shift in the electorate, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Shelby County v. Holder - a case challenging preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act - and this June struck down those provisions 5-4, based on totally unprecedented and arbitrary reasoning conjured out of thin air. SCOTUS has once again showed itself to be an efficient machine for correcting the "errors" in election law that allow Democrats to win elections.
Too many minorities getting in the way of your carefully-laid plans, Republicans? Demographics making you irrelevant? Well, by golly, we'll just have to make it harder for them to vote so that things are nice and fair for you. If they overcome existing Jim Crow tactics, we'll just have to open up the field for new and innovative ones, and dismantle the federal institutional protections against doing so. "Things have changed" in America - and that's a bad thing, so we'll have to reinvent the law to change them back! Back to the Good Ole Days of the Good Ole Boys. Sure, they overcame the obstacles in 2012, but let's see how they manage when they're having to deal with it universally across all 50 simultaneously. And if that's still not enough, well, we'll rule that it's legal to install flaming obstacle courses in front of polling stations in low-income and minority voting districts! How about some spiked rollers, snake pits, and trap doors leading into meat grinders? How about giving corporations a direct vote?
Yeah, you think I'm joking, don't you? You think they're not really going to giving corporations the vote, and then make that vote a function of shares? "But we're already basically like that!" you might protest. Yes, but once again, what do Republicans do when the American people disobey them at the polls? They go to the Supreme Court and make it harder to do it again. Always. Every time. If you run their gauntlet this time, next time there will be dragons; if you beat their dragons, next time there will be a fire moat; if you leap their fire moat; next time there will be sharks with fucking lasers. It's all very funny except the fact that it's really what they do and they're doing it because they intend to impoverish and murder people.
So you better believe that if we ever manage to seriously mangle the GOP again at an election, the Supreme Court will once again decide to "reexamine" some critical legal foundation, and frankly they're running out of possible ways to corrupt our electoral process. While this Court sits, corporations will get an explicit vote, and that vote will become a function of shares and/or wealth at some point via some contrived mechanism. That will make a neat little solution to their demographic difficulties: Just invite the world's billionaires to buy in, because there's no color but green at a shareholder meeting. But maybe I'm just lacking imagination: Maybe there are tons of ways yet remaining for these unelected partisan Commissars to fiddle with the basic underpinnings of American law in order to further rig the game for Republicans. We will certainly find out while they are in the majority.
But if you have any intention of having a voice in the future of this country, this can't and won't continue. We cannot forever power through an ever-thickening phalanx of obstacles between the voters and the outcomes of elections. Democracy is not magic - if you design a system so that the will of the people is thwarted, it will be thwarted. That is what they've been angling toward since 2000, and what they've periodically rewritten the Constitution to guarantee. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy have no intention of letting you determine the composition of your government, and they will continue adding obstacles in your path and giving advantages to the Republican Party until it is a practical impossibility for your voice to matter. So how much more of this are you willing to take? How much of this do you think you'll have a choice about taking before change is totally impossible? How much more of this do you demand that your fellow Americans take before you'll stand up for them?
I sure wish I had the kind of wealth and privilege where this sort of thing is an abstract discussion - an idle "difference of opinion" where the only sin is taking it seriously, because really politics is so much duller than a good cigar on the deck of one's yacht, isn't it, Muffy Dear? We can all agree to disagree while enjoying a good game of polo, isn't that right, Thurston? Ay, Chaz? Right, Harrington? I must say the Shiraz is dreadful today, and...what was I saying? Oh, yes, something about people being denied the right to vote, terrible stuff, I should call my broker about doing something about that. What's that you say? Impeach Supreme Court Jus-- are you mad, my good man? What is this, the Russian Revolution? Be reasonable! The only proper way to change the Court is to win more elections...which they increasingly won't allow. But...umm...anyway, let's not talk about this. I just bought some new yachting shoes, aren't they superb? W- W- Well, how rude! If you don't like my conversation, you can see yourself out of this club at once! Security!
Whether or not you care what happens to this country, you owe somebody other than yourself to make like you give a shit, especially if you (like me) were around in 2000 and failed to stop what followed - you owe somebody who's dead because of our cowardice and complacency in 2000 and afterward to at least acknowledge the facts of what is going on and what is necessary, regardless of your perceived ability to make it happen. You owe all the people who will be trampled on by this Court in the future and by Republicans who use this Court's rulings past, present, and future to admit that they are the institutional root through which the elite continuously rewrite the laws to benefit themselves and make it harder and harder to elect a representative government. You owe it to the truth to say that these people should not be on the Supreme Court any longer: That they abuse their authority to attack the law and the rights of the American people for the sake of partisan power.
And acknowledging that should be the beginning of the process of discussing and discovering how to go about implementing an approach to that fact, not be so dishonest and obtuse as to demand that the means already be in sight before you will even admit the necessity of the ends. The Founders of this country had no clue - no clue - how the hell they were going to get out from under the British when they declared their intention to do so, let alone how they were going to build and grow a nation. They just knew it was necessary: That the fact of independence was upon them, not that it was the easiest option or that the path forward was all laid out for them. The same was true of the Civil Rights movement: They didn't know in advance how they were going to achieve things that seemed impossible up front - they just knew it had to be done, and the urgency of the need is what drove the commitment that led to people engaging to find ways forward.
Now, impeaching five people - or even just four, three, two, or one - is no War of Independence or Civil Rights struggle: It's far, far easier than that. So there are no excuses to pretend it's some kind of bridge too far; some impossible dream; some silly, idle, or quixotic fantasy. It's just what needs to happen, so if you're someone who is so far removed from the necessity that you dismiss its realization as a fantasy, then you are always going to be that person no matter what the subject. We have years to work out the details, because we'll be suffering decades of the consequences if we don't. And in the worst case scenario, the same things happened that were likely to happen anyway, but we stood up and counted ourselves greater than what was being done to us and to others in our name.
The gears of the conservative Supreme Court majority will not stop turning simply because you ignore them or malinger, so unless your plan is to idly complain with every predictable step they take to strip away your rights, do the bare-minimum you can do today: Sign the petition calling for the impeachment of these democracy-devouring parasites. Take the first, humble step toward a future that isn't simply a degeneration of the past into deeper and uglier shadows: Decide that you will no longer tolerate the Republican Party using our Supreme Court as its corrupt partisan Fixer for inconvenient election results.
The laws are there to be protect the people from power, not hem them in from holding power accountable. Elections are held for us to choose our government, not for the government to theatrically affirm itself with predetermined outcomes. And courts are there to protect our rights, not plumb the depths of absurdity looking for sophistry to rationalize attacking our rights from all possible angles. No law is safe and no aspect of the Constitution effective while the cancerous tumor of partisan Republican conservatism festers on our Supreme Court unchallenged.
Sign the linked petition, start your own petition, or start an organization, but do something that isn't just a continuation of the status quo they are so cavalierly corrupting. Do something that acknowledges the nature of this problem: Don't tell me legislation will fix partisan tyranny in the institution with the power to strike down legislation. Don't tell me Constitutional Amendments will solve a problem built on ignoring what the Constitution already says. Don't tell me better election results will fix the problem that is manifesting itself in the form of ever-increasing interference in elections to guarantee that we have less and less chance of winning! Take some initial step to confront the tyranny of these five Justices and deny the legitimacy of power that has become malignant to the very purposes of the Court.
Stand with your fellow citizens for whom the VRA ruling was over the line. Sign the petition because the atrocity of Bush v. Gore and the horrors that followed have never been answered for. Sign the petition because gerrymandering is not a legitimate basis for representative government, especially when the results are the exact opposite of how people vote. Sign the petition because corporations are NOT people. Sign the petition because money is NOT speech. Sign the petition because bribery is a CRIME, not a Constitutional right. Sign the petition because we refuse Jim Crow 2.0. But most of all, sign the petition because it's our country, and that fact may not be overturned 5-4.
7:12 AM PT: I'm gonna sleep for a while.
1:26 PM PT: 110 signatories! It's a humble milestone, folks, but it's something worth being a little chipper about. We've got all the time in the world to build up this movement. It's this Court majority that should be watching the clock.