Thea Riofrancos wrote a piece (hyperlink) for In These Times on November 19th that provides a perfect lead-in to what I want to address today. Here’s what she had to say about what the nomination and confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court demonstrated:
Kavanaugh was granted a lifetime appointment to a deeply undemocratic institution. He was confirmed by a legislative body that counts some votes more than others, giving the loudest voice (per capita) to the most sparsely populated states. The Senate’s majority vote represented a minority of Americans (44 percent). And Kavanaugh was selected by a president who lost the popular vote, a pedigree he shares with three of his esteemed colleagues: Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
It was, in other words, an egregious case of the system working precisely as designed. The framers of the Constitution imagined the Supreme Court, the Senate and the Electoral College to function as checks on the “tyranny of the majority”—in other words, to ensure white male landowners had the final say. Two centuries later, the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements expanded the franchise far beyond what the founders intended. But, thanks to unprecedented electoral spending by corporations and the wealthy, as well as rampant voter suppression—both of which were granted a constitutional green light by recent Supreme Court decisions—the Republican-led government has become increasingly unmoored from the people it ostensibly represents.
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Increasingly we see power stripped naked, no longer protected by the veneer of legitimacy… Legitimacy, or what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called hegemony, is always provisional. Rather than coercion, it requires voluntary submission, which lasts only as long as it is consented to.
Conversely, we also see the hollowness of elite claims to a lost legitimacy that was never truly rooted in a popular mandate.
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As power and legitimacy become untethered, it has become more and more untenable for establishment institutions to maintain the illusion of distance from violence and domination.
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A seemingly endless War on Terror, rampant police brutality and sprawling mass incarceration have made the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence increasingly difficult to maintain. Through those cracks, it’s revealed that the state often uses violence for an entirely different reason: to shore up the class hierarchy. In the relentless search for profits and productivity, capitalism inevitably creates “surplus populations” of unemployed people.
These are in turn seen as a threat to the social order…
Riofrancos’ only significant mistake was limiting her condemnation to Republicans. The Democratic Party — recent victories by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and a few other genuine progressive reformers aside — has become equally unmoored from the people, and is even more responsible for the decline of the republic. That’s because the Democrats have spend the past forty years pretending to still be the party of FDR when, in fact, they are the smarmiest of traitors, sellouts, quislings, and pompous gasbags.
If the Democrats — led by the repulsive and onerous Clintons, and the smooth-talking shyster Obamas — had never deviated from supporting working Americans, there would likely be no need for the Restoration Amendments. But alas, they settled for mouthing the same time-honored catchphrases while selling out hand over fist. In doing so, they demonstrated, quite ably and completely, that we can no longer depend on politicians. Personalities will always be a weak, ineffective, and unreliable substitute for ironclad constitutional protections which have a mechanism, as provided for in Amendment 28: The Right to Honest Government, for citizens to compel enforcement through the courts.
As Riofrancos correctly pointed out, the courts, especially the Supreme Court, were envisioned as a mechanism to keep the great public masses in their place. The power to interpret the law has enabled the scallywags in the black robes to twist the constitution away from the goals set out in the Preamble to the Constitution.
If we can enact the Restoration Amendments the courts will be much more limited in how far afield they can go and still maintain a facade of legitimacy. If they elect to go too far, then the streets may get bloody. As JFK observed, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Hopefully, we will succeed at the former and never witness the latter.
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