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US Supreme Court
The 2020 defeat of Donald Trump’s failed presidency after a single disastrous term during a deadly worldwide pandemic will always be considered one of the most important elections in American history.
But a year and a half later, we’re just beginning to realize Trump’s politically corrupt appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court and more than 220 other lifetime federal judgeships will continue destroying our Constitutional protections for decades.
Trump himself had surprisingly little to do with it. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell began dishonestly manipulating an extreme rightwing takeover the nation’s judiciary before Trump ever took office. When rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia died in early February 2016, Majority Leader McConnell refused to hold a Senate confirmation hearing on Obama’s highly qualified nominee Judge Merrick Garland for nearly a year until Obama’s term ended so Trump could fill the vacancy.
The rightwing Federalist Society supplied Trump with a steady stream of extremist nominees carefully screened for opposition to Roe v. Wade and other far right causes. Trump obediently appointed them to three Supreme Court seats and other federal judgeships with McConnell’s Senate confirming them at breakneck speed.
No one should be surprised 10 of Trump’s nominees received a “Not Qualified” rating from the American Bar Association. Two of those unqualified political hacks withdrew their nominations. Only three received a single Republican negative vote — two from Maine’s Susan Collins and one from Arizona’s Jeff Flake, considered too moderate to win Republican re-election in 2018. Every other grossly unqualified Trump nominee received unanimous Republican support.
One of those seriously flawed judicial appointees has just made herself famous by destroying the ability of the Centers for Disease Control to protect public health during a pandemic. She ruled it was illegal for the CDC to require face masks on airplanes and every other form of crowded public transportation where people are packed tightly together in a confined space breathing each other’s air.
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Deadly Decision
Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s potentially deadly decision failed to provide any legal rationale for her ruling. She simply declared the CDC’s action was illegal despite a federal statute explicitly empowering the CDC “to make and enforce such regulations . . . necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission and spread of communicable diseases” by requiring “sanitation . . . and other measures.” Face masks preventing the transmission of a deadly respiratory disease under crowded conditions certainly qualify as a reasonable public health measure.
Mizelle was only 33 when McConnell rushed her confirmation through a lame duck session of the Senate in his final days as majority leader. She could be overturning U.S. laws based solely on her own political whims for a half century.
The radical rightwing 6-to-3 Trumped-up majority on the Supreme Court might not have to gut the Constitution so many different ways. The justices can simply let Trump judges in Republican states like Texas, Florida and Louisiana do their dirty work for them. Trump’s appointees in all those states have begun using local cases brought by rightwing fringe groups to issue national injunctions throwing out Biden’s policies fighting climate change, restoring environmental protections and treating immigrants and refugees more humanely.
Republicans have always been more politically focused on judicial appointments than Democrats have and look where it’s gotten us. The 80% of Americans who support the Constitutional right of a woman to end an unwanted pregnancy according to Gallup are holding their breath to learn whether the Trump Court will completely abolish the 50-year-old right of a woman to control her own life or merely eviscerate it.
Hooting and Hollering
There was something disturbing about the whoops of selfish delight breaking out on airplanes when pilots and flight attendants announced midair on some flights a Florida judge had just thrown out the federal mask mandate. There was hooting and hollering and tossing masks in the air by a joyous privileged class who take airplanes like the rest of us run to the Stop N Shop. They had finally thrown off the yoke of government oppression, emerging from the torturous nightmare of being forced to wear a square of cloth over their mouth and nose to protect the lives of people they don’t even know.
Biden is leading the democracies of the world to provide support for Ukrainians fighting for their lives against real torture and oppression from an invading Russian army. Biden’s also fighting another war at home to protect democracy from Republicans who violently attempted to overthrow his free and fair election.
For some reason protecting American democracy from destruction has not yet become the top priority in November’s midterms. But there is no more important issue in November’s election and the election after that and the one after that and on and on until Republicans as well as Democrats support voting rights for all Americans and accept the outcome of free and fair elections in a democracy.
