Secular Café: A rant about the US Supreme Court

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A rant about the US Supreme Court Apr 28th 2012, 08:17 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...-supreme-court Quote: The 2008 elections represented a decisive repudiation of the policies of George W Bush and the Republican party. Yet, conservative Republicans still control the supreme court – and this fact may effectively nullify the results of the 2008 election in several important respects. Worse, the Roberts court seems poised to advance its own partisan policy preferences not in the name of fundamental rights or even serious concerns about federal power, but behind feeble constitutional arguments that all but announce their own unseriousness. The most egregious example, of course, is the very real possibility that the supreme court will strike down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), otherwise known as Obamacare, the centerpiece domestic legislation of President Obama's first term. While Obama exaggerated when he asserted that this kind of judicial activism would be "unprecedented", it would be the first time in more than 70 years that the supreme court will have struck down a legislative enactment that was so central to the agenda of an incumbent administration... ...What's even worse is that, at the oral arguments, several justices could not even bother to conceal the partisan political sentiments which the implausible constitutional arguments against the PPACA are clearly meant to advance. Justice Antonin Scalia, in particular, peppered his arguments with inane Republican buzzwords used to oppose the PPACA, sounding more like a third-rate wingnut talkshow host than an associate justice of the supreme court of the United States. This unprincipled attack on federal power does not stop with challenges to the PPACA. Continuing with one of the Rehnquist court's most dubious lines of precedent, last month a bare majority of the Roberts court (consisting entirely of its Republican appointees) denied a state employee the right to sue his employer over a violation of the Family Medical Leave Act. The court's conclusion that, in this case, a person had a right without a remedy is based on the unattractively anti-democratic principle of "sovereign immunity", the idea that a state cannot be sued even by its own citizens without its consent... ...The Republican party may have lost in 2008, but its political will still lives on in a Republican-dominated supreme court that, at times, cannot even bother to pretend that it is doing constitutional law.

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