Citizens United and Roe v.Wade

I finally had the time to read the Citizens United decision. Now, a chef is many things and one of them is to be informed about how anything can affect the people I work for and care about like my own family and the people whom I serve every night. So this is just a heads-up letting you know that the Citizens United decision handed down by this Supreme Court is an absolute abomination. 

Not only is it so far-reaching that it has invalidated parts of precedents that have stood since 1904, it totally repudiates the corruptive nature of unlimited amounts of money in the electoral process. What is even more alarming is the intellectual mechanism they applied to include arguments that were not even put before the court.  The majority concluded that regardless of how long a precedent has stood it does not mean that the decision was well-reasoned and that, in and of itself, in their opinion, is enough for them to overturn subsequent precedents that an earlier badly reasoned precedents gave rise to regardless of how long the general public and the Congress has abided by the laws those precedents informed. Un-effin-believable!   

Plainly speaking, if the current Supreme Court wants to decide a case along political lines, the majority of the Court simply has to agree that an earlier decision was not well-reasoned and not in the tradition of what any particular amendment was intended to do by the Framers as they see it. Not just as it was applied in a specific instance but in general as it was applied in all cases that came after it.

This is beyond radical.  This is destabilizing. 

It tips the power of the government to an unelected, appointed body that has decided it has the ability to overturn decisions and laws passed by previous Courts and an elected Congress as long as they have concluded the previous justices used flawed reasoning.  This sets up the Court not only to strike down the Affordable Health Care Act but any other law that comes before them. They have decided they can attach to any oral argument before the Court any aspect of a previous precedent as long as it was somehow referenced in an argument even if as it was applied in that specific argument before the court has nothing to do with how or why they want to reexamine the underlying precedent. 

They have decided they can overturn anything they want to and act as a Super Legislature by simply determining that a precedent was badly reasoned no matter how long it has been in effect.  By extension, any of the controversial decisions such as Voting Rights Act or a Roe v. Wade simply has to be deemed badly reasoned in order for them to feel they have the responsibility and the authority to overturn a prior decision invalidating the entire string of legislation that was based on those prior precedents.  If you don’t pay attention you can kiss Roe v. Wade good bye.  Never mind the majority decision regarding contraception in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where Justice Souter wrote the opinion where he stated as one of the guiding interests that people have organized their lives and have come to rely on the stability Roe v. Wade gives them and to overturn that decision would be extraordinarily disruptive.  If the same type of case goes before this Court it is almost guaranteed to be overturned.  All you have to do is look at the recklessness of the Citizens decision on the nation, the entire electoral process and the promise of our ability to create a self-determined government and it’s not a hard to imagine they would find it within their purview to disrupt only a segment of the population, women. FTLOB!

Having read all of Justice’s Rehnquist’s books, I was absolutely dumbfounded when he appointed Bush 2 president instead of sending the matter back to Florida to be decided.  When I read the decision I was astounded at the intellectual gymnastics he had to perform in order to reason his decision.  It was a complete disgrace of a Justice whose opinions I did not agree with but once respected. His opinions were always presented firmly grounded, well reasoned and complete.  When I came to find out that in the latter part of his life he had become addicted to prescription drugs I created a scenario in my head that made his opinion easier to stomach where someone found out and held it over his head so that in order not to be exposed as a common drug addict at the end of his career he developed the intellectual dexterity on par with the physical dexterity of a 13 year old Russian gymnast in order to put Gore v. Bush to rest. It made me sad but I could live with it, not happily, because he grounded his opinion in the federal government’s interest in an orderly transition of the government against the state’s interests to recount the votes. Thin but arguable and completely against anything he had ever spoke about or wrote in the past.  The majority of this Court and Chief Justice Roberts are just simply crackpots. Really dangerous crackpots.

It's time to pay attention to everything.