Eight Year Storm Seems Almost Over

Sadly, though, anybody with that mindset – absolute tranquility – is fooling themselves. Sure, a new president can pretty quickly change the look of the top office; that is easy. It’s easy because most of what goes on in front of the public is show.

Fixing the executive branch, getting people to properly run the domestic and foreign mechanisms will take much longer.

Even if the new president picked exactly the right people and put them to work on exactly the correct jobs on the first hour of the presidency, it will still take years for the necessary changes to happen. That’s because the Bush/Cheney Administration has been nothing if not thorough in reaching into every area where the executive branch has power, altering and changing rules and procedures to satisfy the concerns of business, religious conservatives, and the overall right-wing political agenda. Most of these area get little or no media attention, so they are invisible to the average American, unless, for example, one decides to visit a national park and finds its hours are limited and its services all but non-existent, and that is but a minor example.

Another major factor facing the next chief executive and his or her presidency is that all the political leaders throughout the world will have to reevaluate and, hopefully, change many of their own polities and politics to meet those of a changing American face. They may need to convince themselves that the ugly face of the United States that they have seen for eight years was an anomaly. It can only be hoped that most leaders and their citizens will believe that a return to the America they thought they knew is a return to the real personality of the country, but it will take time to prove that to the world.

Many laws will have to be changed and regulations reversed.

One issue on its own, the whole question of presidential rights to add “signing statements” to congressional bills demands major review. Bush has used it to take over legislative prerogatives for the past six years; he has overturned more that 800 laws whenever he disagreed with them. He simply did away with them, or announced that while they may apply to the citizenry, the did not affect his imperial presidency.

It is also true that some citizens will not be certain of the Bush Administration’s actual diminishment until its final term is over and it is disbanded. It is now a quietly, yet frequently discussed question whether Mr. Bush will follow the Constitution and return to Texas and retirement. It is feared he could declare a state of emergency, suspend the normal succession rules and stay on as emergency president.

Ridiculous?

With George Bush and Richard Cheney, and their entrenched and dedicated right-wing supporters, no, unfortunately, the worry is not ridiculous at all.

It is important to recall that this administration, unlike any other in American history, has not only sought to pack the Supreme Court with hard core right-wing true believers, but it has infiltrated the Justice Department, the Surgeon General’s department, and virtually every other arm of the executive branch, including the military, with youthful, true-believers who often have power and authority over senior, experienced bureaucrats, but whose actual job is similar to that of ‘political commissar,’ assuring that the policies and goals of the administration are adhered to in the most minute detail.

This may seem extreme to state, but sadly it isn’t. Young men and women from Christian universities and law schools have been installed in all the executive departments, and only a few of them have been revealed in the recent scandals, along with the upheaval that has taken place in the Air Force Academy over the defacto policy of asserting one established religion – Christian fundamentalism - and the even more recent scandal involving active duty U.S. Army generals and other high ranking officers helping to film videos for an ultra-right Christian organization, an organization that has been holding prayer services in the Pentagon.

All of this is compounded by the hard fact that Mr. Bush has won two elections under serious questions. And he has declared war on “terrorism” forever. What might stop him is the likely revolt that such a takeover of the presidency would trigger.

So let us presume that a few years hence the president and the congress manage to make some true progress in the executive and legislative branches.

There will still be the judiciary to consider.

That may not be quite as quick a fix.

Bush has appointed conservatives - ultra-conservatives - to the nine-member bench of the Supreme Judicial Court that now comprise a majority. They will pose the deepest challenge to America in the post-Bush era. In their very first set of decisions at the beginning of the summer, they dropped some judicial bomb shells with 5-4 votes that showed clearly where they plan to go; their direction is somewhere around 1950 or earlier.

They are not tweaking the fringes of American law, they are changing basic precepts. Kids are not as free to speak as they were a year ago, women who lost pay for decades cannot reclaim it, women getting partial birth abortion have no right to their own health and have seen other rights removed.

The Supreme Court members and their political division is as follows: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas, all of whom voted together as conservatives on the following cases, and Stephen G. Beryer, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stephens voting as the liberal or middle-of-the-road minority.

To anyone looking beyond just these few cases illustrated here and into the next 10 to 15 years of American justice, it is probable that the prospects will indeed be frightening. Consider this sampling and think ahead.

Less Free Speech for students, in or out of school

An 18 year old Alaskan high school kid, Joseph Frederick, showed up at a rally for the 2002 U.S. Olympic Torch Relay in Juneau and brought a sign that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." This rally was just off campus and widely televised. The sign was supposedly in favor of drugs.

Juneau-Douglas High School principal, Deborah Morse, tore across the street and told Frederick to take down the sign. He refused; she took it from him and put him on suspension for 10 days. Eventually the student-teacher disagreement got to the high court.

There, the argument about the student’s rights to free speech became nationally important. Even though Frederic was off school property and just on a lark, the principle and the school claimed the boy should be disciplined.

On June 25, 2007, a divided Supreme Court held that public school officials do not violate a student’s free speech rights when they prohibit displays that promote illegal drug use, and remarkably, this censoring authority applies even when the action takes place off school grounds.

“This case began with a silly, nonsensical banner, it ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message,” warned Judge John Paul Stevens, who was joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Majority Justices John G. Roberts Jr., Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas set the rule.

All school children have fewer rights because the majority sees schools as inherently more deserving of First Amendment powers over attending students, on or off campus. The judges have tightened the noose around all young people, perhaps because the young are naturally more liberal as they test themselves and the rules and systems around them. This ruling makes students less free.

Making the children of democracy more free would logically seem to be one of the primary duties of a high court in a free republic. In a free nation, the courts, especially the highest courts, are the main guardians against legislative and executive excesses.

Now, not so much.

Sex discrimination

Supervisor Lilly Ledbetter was almost 60 years old and on the verge of retiring when she came to realize she was at the time, and had been for years, consistently underpaid at work by what her lawyer called a "good old boy’s" network at Goodyear, the famous tire manufacturer.

After 19 years on the job, she was actually underpaid by $225,000, one court said. The case was heard in Gadsden, Alabama.

But the Supreme Judicial Court said the law only covers six months, from the time of the employer’s reported malfeasance, so the woman could not possibly ask for the larger amount. Earlier court juries gave her $4 million in lost compensation and penalty assessments against the company, but the high court set the damages far lower.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was outraged that the majority of the court would so narrowly apply the law and said publicly that Congress needs to expand the time period that the law applies.

Rather than trying to enforce anti-discrimination laws designed to protect women, the court chose to protect big business by clinging to a time table that was, and still is, ridiculous. Ledbetter went to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission less than a month after receiving the letter.

Sorry, too late; not actionable.

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights imposes a six-month limitations period on discriminatory acts. If it happened more than a half a year ago, it didn’t happen.

This is blind, deaf and dumb justice.

EEOC said each paycheck was a separate discriminatory instance, regardless of the legal timetable. But that argument got thrown out. In this scenario, the woman would need to have filed a discrimination claim every time she got paid. On May 29, 2007, a divided Supreme Court upheld the 11th Circuit’s decision, finding that the limitations period for a disparate pay claim cannot be extended or disregarded.

The majority’s decision “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure,” Justice Ginsburg asserted, adding: “In our view, this court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

So there we have it; the current court favors big business interest, with all its attendant monetary power and cadres of lawyers with which it can defend itsels against the charges of any one, lone woman

In effect, the court sided with big business and against women workers.

Rights of non-white high school students

Jill Kurfirst began looking at which Seattle-area high schools her teenage son Andy should attend. Andy planned to go to college, so it was important to determine whether to attend Ballard, Roosevelt or Hale High Schools. That was six years ago.

Ballard offered a special Biotech Career Academy. He met the prerequisites, applied and was accepted into the program. However, Ballard was one of several schools where the Seattle Public School District gave preference to minorities; the district considered the school racially imbalanced.

On June 28, 2007, a sharply divided Supreme Court struck down the Seattle and Lousville plans. It effectively curtailed efforts to provide a more balanced educational playing field for minority students in order to assert the rights of white students. That was not what it said it was doing, of course. But it what the high court did.

“There is a cruel irony in the chief justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown,” said Justice John Paul Stevens.

Brown vs. Board of Education was the high court case that established in 1954 that separate and equal is, fundamentally, unequal. Today’s court has turned a color-blind eye on education. This casts a dangerous shadow on American law for years to come.

Justice Stephen Breyer also charged the majority with effectively overruling Brown. “Brown held out a promise,” wrote Breyer, who was joined by Stevens and Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown.… This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.”

Of course there are far wider implications now because black Americans are not at all the only significant minority citizens. Latinos have become a substantial population in many cities throughout the nation, and Orientals are a growing minority. All deserve equal treatment. But the new court has thrown the case back to the days before Brown, under the guise that everyone is viewed equally and therefore to establish quotas is to establish discrimination; however, the 1954 Brown decision recognized that in practice that is not so; whites are very often, if not always, given preference over other racial and ethnic groups.

Abortion Rights

Members of the new court have started down a path that will inevitably end at the door of the Roe vs. Wade act: the right to have an abortion.

President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act in 2003. Of course it was controversial and served as a political football as it unfolded just at the time of the off-year elections. Those elections brought a micro-victory for the challengers, the Democrats.

But the Supreme Court is now fully in the Bush camp.

The high court used its now common 5-4 vote to uphold the president’s legislation. Its actions have left all sides expecting much more fundamental challenges to American abortion law. Abortion will be attacked directly and soon.

A woman’s right to determine whether she will or will not carry a pregnancy to a full-term birth has been under assault since Roe vs. Wade first broke with centuries of precedent and declared each and every woman inherently has that freedom of choice.

Now, however, there is a Supreme Court majority that wants to stop women from having the right to make their own decision whether or not to abort a pregnancy.

How is this Partial-Birth act indicative of that?

Simply, the high court majority did not even consider a woman’s right to protect her own life and health; such considerations are secondary to the life of a fetus. So the judgment is inescapable; the high court would favor the fetus’ health over the mother’s.

Eventually, the abortion controversy may be one of the court’s biggest wars.

Abortion is in the cross hairs. And Bush appointees are the ones looking down the sights with their fingers on the trigger.

Justice Clarence Thomas has, in recent history, declared his wish to "reiterate my view that the Court's abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe...has no basis in the Constitution." Given the power his side of the court now holds, those words are a crystal-clear battle cry and a hard-edged warning to all women.

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the majority's opinion "alarming," and noted, "for the first time since Roe, the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health."