The Supremes: Cruel and Unusual

No, this post is not about Diana Ross and her erstwhile singing group.

It is about a far more mirthless band of addle-pated, police state corporatists. It is about our roughly (and I do mean roughly) consistent band of Supreme Court brothers who routinely toss out stare decisis, elicit opinions utterly incoherent with the Court's own precedents, supply "free speech" to corporations while simultaneously denying it to harmless individuals or groups thereof and rule against protections for endangered species at the behest of industry. They are a gaggle of Christianist, racist, sexist Federalist Society dragoons masquerading as constitutional experts, dressed-up in the now ratty and threadbare gowns of liberty, jumping through legalistic hoops in service of their underwriters, employing a grim and barren ideology to justify it all. These five jackanapes are now this country's final arbiters of justice in America: Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy.

This sullen collection of shabby toads are turning back the clock on strides made against tyrannies of a shameful past. In the final session of the Court today, their latest back-to-the future move was made and the five smirking fiends have just struck down a public school desegregation law. Apparently unaware of what Justice Alito himself called the "incremental approach" to changing law and precedent, apologists, or those too afraid to recognize what is really going on, immediately set out to mitigate concern about the decision, claiming that it is "not the crushing blow to affirmative action in public schools that it initially appears to be."

Further hidden in the news was yet another bow to corporate America, wherein the Court turned back a 96 year old ban on agreements between manufacturers and retailers in setting "price floors." This was again a 5-4 decision, the usual suspects in the majority. Normally viewed as collusion, pricing agreements are now deemed reasonable if they can "promote competition." Because price collusion often does that.

Stare decisis be damned and damned and damned again.