On Scalia & Trump [View all]

[H2O Man]

In the past week, I’ve put up a couple of O.P.s, that focused on the potential for our federal government to totally disconnect with the Constitution of the United States. Indeed, the citizens of the United States should recognize and reject the tendency of individuals in the government to bend, or go against, the Constitution. We should not allow that document to become a parched piece of ancient history, hidden in the vault of some museum.

Today on both CNN and MSNBC, I’ve watched -- and listened to -- reports that included Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s highly offensive position on black university students. It was as if Scalia took offense to Donald Trump’s setting the bar low, as far as being the worst horse’s ass in America today, and Scalia sought to reclaim that title. However, it is worse than that: this provides evidence of exactly how a majority of the 1% view this nation’s people. Rather than “competition,” this is the coordinated agenda of the worst enemies of America.

In 2004, former Nixon White House theorist Kevin Phillips published, “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush” (Penguin). On pages 107-108, Phillips addressed some of the connections between Scalia and the Bush family. This included a quote from the 5-justice majority decision on December 11, 2000, that put Bush-Cheney in office: “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for President of the United States ….”

Scalia takes pride in believing he is the Master of Original Intent. In a sick sort of way, he is: in large part, the original Constitution provided for a republic, to benefit the “enlightened few” -- with that club being restricted to wealthy, educated white men. It wasn’t until the early 1800s, that the nation became a constitutional democracy -- with some structures of a republic firmly in place. A person need study no more than about how common citizens began to vote for Senators, to get a historical grasp of the tensions between groups of wealthy, educated white men. Or, simply consider the Bill of Rights.

Individuals, organizations, states, and even the US government attempted to deny various groups of citizens their constitutional rights, ever since that powerful Bill of Rights was enacted. Even the US Supreme Court has ruled against groups and individual citizens, far too often. On the other hand, the Court has been consistent in upholding the rights of wealthy, educated, “straight” white men over the centuries. In recent times, they’ve even upheld the “rights” of corporations.

Scalia provides a unique window into which we can see the cold, less-than-human heart of the 1%. Few quotes grant us access to their actual beliefs than the following, from Kevin Phillips’ book:

“Part of Scalia’s objection to democracy, amplified a year later, was that it got in the way of a return to an eighteenth-century interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Speaking at the January 2002 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, he opined that as written, the Constitution reflected natural or divinely inspired law that the state was an instrument of God. ‘That consensus has been upset,’ he said, ‘by the emergence of democracy.’ He added that ‘the reactions of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it but resolution to combat it as effectively as possible’.”

It would be easy to think that Scalia merely represents the extreme right-wing of one political party; yet, his position is supposed to be nonpartisan. Rather, he is one of the most powerful people in American society, where he believes his noble obligation is to channel the divinity of the 1%. And that, as the most recent comments on affirmative action confirm, includes a “resolution to combat ….as effectively as possible” efforts by the 99% to be active, equal members of society.

No one argues that “affirmative action” in 2015 is a flawless approach to righting historic wrongs. Yet, no one has proposed a more effective and fair approach, Of all the problems facing public education, affirmative action is hardly among the most pressing. When more young black men are being caught up in the criminal justice system, than being enrolled in college, it should be clear that affirmative action still has a significant role in today’s social reality.

Just as with the “Founding Fathers” -- a relatively small group, which contained diverse thinking -- there is a wide range in the thinking among the “leaders” in our federal government today. And, in many ways, these are important. There are, for example, significant differences between Bernard Sanders and Rafael Edward Cruz, even though both of them are members of the same small, elite political organization. It would be foolish to hold that “they are all the same.”

Yet, at the same time, both Sanders and Cruz are part of the same system, the US Senate -- just as both are running to be president, the highest position within the larger system of the federal government. And, despite the very real differences in character between Sanders and Cruz, that system is primarily geared towards increasing the advantages -- economically, socially, and politically -- of the 1%. And a significant tactic for doing so is to divide the public into smaller groups that compete with one another.

Back in 1970, Vine Deloria, Jr., published “We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (Dell). Deloria predicted that the 1% would attempt to create a modern version of feudalism -- with rule by a corporate elite -- by dividing the public, and pitting groups against each other. He knew that so long as these groups mistakenly saw other groups as their competition, and thus enemy, that the future of America would be a feudal state.

However, if those same groups learned some basic lessons in organization -- the same one that many of the Founding Fathers learned from the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy -- and recognized that the 1% were their competition (and their common enemy), that would promote a higher level of democracy, and social justice. And 45 years later, that remains true. Indeed, it is even more important that we recognize this reality today, than in 1970.