NOTICE TO THE SUPREME COURT: “THE US CONSTITUTION WAS NOT WRITTEN LAST WEEK.”

…Todays US Supreme Court Justices

 

The founding fathers had no idea about the world we live in today, but they knew the Constitution would continue on.

It has become very disturbing that it seems every Tea Party member and many Republican conservative politicians are today, running around with their pocket-size copy of the US Constitution.  They seem to want to answer every question that comes up by taking out their miniature Constitution and quoting verbatim for answering every political question that comes up in today’s conversations.

They don’t seem to understand that the founders were bright enough that they knew that they would have no idea what it would be like in their country 200 or 300 years later.  They did however expect the Constitution to be a foundational document for developing the future laws and rules as the country grew and developed.  But this great document, as outstanding as it was, did have its own problems, such as its original support of slavery, but the amendments were there for handling those issues.

However,  the one area that is becoming a glaring issue for today’s activist US Supreme Court is that the Constitution is very clear in stating how we must resist anything that supports an expanding inequality between the very rich and the very poor.  Or in other words, the middle class must be supported and maintained in order to maintain the nation’s system as a democratic republic.

In a recent legal article, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, in the Boston University Law Review, Mr. Joseph Fishkin and Mr. William Forbath of the University of Texas School of Law, they made it clear that the Citizens United case directly contradicts the US Constitution’s clear focus on idea of shared self-rule.

The article shows that America’s republican form of government, without serious constitutional restraints against an oligarchy, which is exactly what Citizens-United doesn’t do, by its saying that money is a form of “free speech”.  That is the first step in going against what the founders were writing against in the Constitution.  The original document states that the nation must be structured for supporting an economy that maintains a broad middle class that is accessible to everyone.

FDR’s “New Deal” is a very good example of this approach and those programs were examples of being against any inequality. It made strong arguments that we cannot keep our constitutional democracy without constantly building and supporting a strong middle class.

In the article by Fishkin and Forbath they write, “Extreme concentrations of economic and political power undermine equal opportunity and equal citizenship.  In this way, oligarchy is incompatible with, and a threat to, the American constitutional scheme.”  In other words, the 5 conservatives that were the “yea votes” in the 5-4 Citizens decision really blew it.  They basically went against the Constitution’s writers by basically saying that if you have the big bucks, you are “more equal” in America than the average citizen that is living from paycheck to paycheck.

In going back to FDR and his approach to the average American, Franklin Roosevelt, is famous for his statement, “The inevitable consequence of placing economic and financial control in the hands of the few [the top 1%] would be the destruction of the base of our form of government.” 

Basically, the current Supreme Court just thumbed their nose at FDR as they awarded the US political system solely to Wall Street and the top .01%.

But this isn’t the first time the conservatives have tried to take this approach in America.

Back in the later 1800’s and during what was called “The Gilded Age”, the conservative tried to sell that approach to America as well.  Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down” approach was not a new idea back in 1980, as in the late 1800’s, the conservatives were selling that same approach.  A well-known journalist of the time, Mr. James Hudson had written that “....imbedded [in the Constitution] is the principle [mandating] the widest distribution among the people, not only of political power, but of the advantages of wealth, education and social influence.”

The reality is that it is time to make it well known that America’s financial inequality today is at its widest point since just before the Great Depression of the 1920’s.  It took that Great Depression, the election of a Democratic President (FDR) and a Democratic Congress, plus WWII, to get the inequality balance that made the US the great super power we are today. 

 

But that is all at risk as the conservatives, (that have never been correct when they have been in power), as they are setting the rules through their five activist judges on the US Supreme Court.

If only those conservatives would just put away their pocket-sized US Constitutions and remember why it was originally written and what it originally stood for in the late 1700’s.  It is a foundation document that must be applied to today’s 21^st century, not as the five conservatives on today's highest court are attempting to do with these latest decisions.

Copyright G.Ater  2014