This session, the newly-ripened conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court of the United States decided it was time to lift up their robes and piss on the 21st century and reality. The half-dozen justices, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, looked out at a nation, no, a world that demands progress, that demands care, that demands a government that can act to help people, and said, "Nah. Fuck that." And their reasoning essentially came down to, in every case, "Because we can."
We have a gun crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that the only thing that mattered was that more people have easier access to guns. We have a policing crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that it's more important to protect cops from being sued or charged with crimes and that you don't need to worry about being told your Miranda rights anymore. We have an ongoing pandemic that has killed over a million people in this country. The Supreme Court said that public safety takes a back seat to whatever stupid bullshit makes people decide not to get a vaccine. We have an electoral crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that gerrymandering away fair representation is a-okay.
And then the Court decided, in two cases, that the whole separation of church and state wasn't real because Christians need to have group prayers at school and schools that discriminate against LGBT people need to get our tax dollars. The former one there is where Gorsuch, lying about the facts of the case, told students who feel pressured into praying to suck it up, which would probably get him a cane up his ass from Benjamin Franklin, which would be some actual originalism.
And then the Court decided that a fetus has more rights than the woman it's attached to, and so fuck 50 years of Roe v. Wade. It's time to turn that motherfucking clock back to the 1950s. Alito insisted that Roe was the cause of chaos because anti-choicers were sad about it, and he used as an excuse, among others, that states had anti-abortion laws 150 years ago, which is so fucking dumb that it boggles the goddamn mind. It didn't matter that the Court, in throwing it back to the states, created two different legal statuses for women and girls in the country. It didn't matter that the Court created two different countries, essentially, if not 50 different ones. "We can do this, so we will," they said, "because fuck you, liberals." Which, to be fair, makes more sense than anything in the goddamn decision.
And then the Court decided that, despite a climate emergency that will wreck the earth, the Environmental Protection Agency really can't protect the environment, even though the statue that established it said that it explicitly could. In the case over setting standards for systems to reduce emissions at power plants and elsewhere, Roberts wrote, "Yeah, I don't like that so here's a thing I made up to overturn it and eat shit because these other five crazy pricks will go along with me. Just be grateful we didn't completely outlaw the EPA." So, yeah, enjoy that "air" and "water" while you can.
Hell, I haven't even mentioned the fucking over of tribal sovereignty for indigenous people or the cases that fucked over habeas rights. And this isn't getting into the fact that the Court has decided to hear a case that will essentially give state legislatures the right to overturn elections if they feel like it. In other words, yeah, you should totally vote to change things, but the Supreme Court is gonna make sure that your vote only matters if you're conservative, because, clearly, those are the only real Americans.
A lawyer friend of mine said to me after the Dobbs decision on abortion rights, "I'm fucking scared to death because those justices decided that precedent doesn't matter anymore. And if once you decide that, you can do whatever you want and justify it in whatever bullshit way you want." Which is as accurate a way to describe the damage that has been done.
I have this image in my head that I can't get rid of. It's when the first woman dies because she attempted to give herself an abortion in one of the states that outlawed it, like Louisiana, and caused massive internal bleeding. I picture the corpse being delivered to the Supreme Court, to the chambers of Samuel Alito. When the corpse arrives, Alito invites the other four justices who voted with him on Dobbs to join him. And then they take turns fucking the corpse in front of each other, Alito first because he wrote the majority opinion and then Thomas because he wants to use this woman's corpse as a way to undermine the rest of modernity and then Gorsuch because he got onto the Court only through Mitch McConnell telling fairness and comity to get the fuck out of the Senate and then Kavanaugh gets sloppy fourths because he's still just a beer-drinking asshole who lied to senators faces about what he really believed about Roe. Finally, they all gather round and cheer on Barrett as she fucks the corpse's face until she orgasms, high-fiving one another when she's done. They're not ashamed of what they did, but they know they have to head to church to confess and be absolved of their sins, like good Catholics and pseudo-Catholics. And on the way out, Thomas places a single one of his pubic hairs on the woman's forehead.
That's really fucked up, yeah, but so is the nation that the Supreme Court wants us to live in. And Democrats need to recognize how much worse things are getting. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren have been leading on this by calling out the Court and not pretending that it is above political attack. That's the direction to go in. Make reforming the Court, whether through more justices or more regulations (which the Constitution allows Congress to do). Congress should act like it's co-equal.
Now is not the time for rational, calm responses that consider all sides. Fuck that. This is a five-alarm freakout because the cruelest states are already teeing up laws to prevent women from traveling to another state for an abortion, as well as outlawing abortion-inducing prescription drugs. They're even coming up with ways to make information about getting an abortion elsewhere illegal. And if you think for one fucking second that the Christian Taliban (which, yes, is a good messaging phrase) justices who shitcanned the Establishment Clause will all of a sudden uphold the First Amendment, you need to fucking get out of the political arena.
This Court has put it all on the table, all that it wants to undermine in this country. We're heading into an Independence Day that feels sarcastically named in the no-longer United States. The time for fake moderation is over. The majority of the nation backs all the things the supposed "extreme left" wants (because it's not extreme at all). Now, Democrats need to back it fully, and with full voice, as we head towards the midterms with a desperate hope we can stop the country from being murdered by the right.
