On some Supreme Court Opinions /6 27 2025

 I sometimes read United States Federal Supreme Court opinions for fun, and today I read the ones released most recently. I think I can safely say most of them didn’t go my way. It’s frightening really, reading stories online and understanding someone’s point of view, but then realizing that it is actually happening to you. I mean, folk who disagree with one supreme Court ruling or another tend to have strong opinions on the matter, forecasting the end of the world as the result of an idea they don’t like, but mostly it is more bark then bite. Today didn’t feel like that, because it’s become painfully obvious that the court has been politically hacked. It was argued today that allowing DNA testing wouldn't make a difference, but we are going to forbid the testing anyway. Why are they causing harm when it doesn't matter? Why are they shattering any attempt at a further investigation of the turn if it doesn't matter? The idea itself is inconsistent, and as far as I can tell the ruling actually boils down to stripping rights away from criminals because they are criminals. There is a serious whiff of treating those condemned by the criminal justice system as subhuman, unworthy of recognition. 

There was a dissent that held how a court vacating a sentencing actually doesn't vacate the sentence. There was another pair of rulings where it was held that because a law wasn’t used very much in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it should not apply today and was always unconstitutional. Yet, a different ruling divided on the same day said that a law passed in the late eighteen hundred was unconstitutional because it was out of date with modern reality. How can both those claims be true, that old means important when they like it, and also that old means decrepit when they don’t? The rulings consistently give the executive office more and more power, but the person who has repeatedly argued for that disagrees in the singular case of the ADA, social healthcare. The logic is ridiculous, holding both a certain view and also its opposite, depending on if the judge supports the law the ruling is considering. My mother calls these folk insurrectionists, and I’m starting to believe her, because the blatant obviousness of their political opinions overwhelming a reasoned argument has come out of hiding, crawled up from its dank hole, and whither or not it has climbed a greasy pole, certainly seems intent on overturning what they feel was stolen. The neo-confederacy, the oligarchy of the wealthy, the religious fundamentalists, and formed an unholy union and seem determined to overthrow the republic. 

Jackson's dissent was fiery and sharp, and she didn’t even have a ‘respectfully, I dissent’, which for supreme court opinions, is like throwing blood on the page. She lets loose her full rage, warning of the destruction of the rule of law, and the supreme court’s maiming of its own mighty claw. Is this what we are to be reduced to, this mighty nation of ours? Repeating the same problems and issues for three hundred years, giving full rein to pilgrim fears? How is it that the old land seems now brighter than ours, as we intentionally destroy our own stripes and stars? 

This country wears its scars proudly, having fought for rights and duties, taking pride in our history and victories against oppression, but there has also always been this undercurrent, where having overthrown the kids of old, the even more ancient priests have attempted to rise up and take back their power of command, that power which before written history was taken from them by the kings, and which descended during the enlightenment into the hands of the people. These priests are not always religious, in the sense of worshipping a god or casting a spell, but they are the sort of people who would separate folk into only two corps: Those worthy of heaven, and those doomed to hell. There is no great, there is no in-between, there is no compromise they will accept, no agreement they will not betray, and no logic they will not corrupt or pervert in the pursuit of power and authority, land and wealth. Down with the stranger and the different is their cry, down with those who on perfection would dare to spy, or recall our previous words, or ask us questions when we have already told them all the answers they need to know. The movement is not merely anti-intellectual, it is anti-intelligence flat-out, shouting down progress of any sort, declaring that nothing more needs to be done, and life could not be improved in any possible way, not even one. - And if it can, if the peasants and rebels dare to think that life could be better, then look out, because since the immaculate priests, like Immortal Joe, are in charge, it couldn’t possibly be their fault. Therefore, it must be someone else's: Those in our midst who are of a different race or who hold a different creed, or are overcome with the sin of greed, which must be beaten out of them. The far right and the far left are a circle which would lock the neck of every free human being in a chain, and the lock is in the middle of that collar: The eye is more important than the pyramid on the dollar, for structure and common effort only serves when by doing so our sight is lifted up high. If we cannot climb to the top of the pyramid because it is forbidden by those who stand on the mid-steps, then we would be forever cursed to exist in its shade, by our own appointed wisemen betrayed. Is our national law about to fracture in a thousand ways, treated differently in a thousand places, and applied unequally to a thousand different people? If I'm nice and quiet, none of the rulings today will apply directly to me. For now. I don't see an entempled Caesar or Alexander on the horizon yet, but I see the road to one being paved once again.