For centuries, it has been debated whether humans have an innate sense of justice. As the debate still rages on, I subscribe to the notion that, yes, indeed, most of us, since our childhood, have had a sense of right and wrong and what’s fair or not. The children’s play so demonstrate each day.
Given our primate’s lineage, to have a civilized, non-arbitrary, or violent cohabitation, our ancestors devised social contracts, later codified as laws. We realized long ago that given our very human frailties and misdeeds and our reflexive tendency to cover up our misdeeds with lies or to eliminate our opponents violently, our laws needed to discourage or rectify the consequence of such undesirable impulses.
Thus, we decided that the best among ourselves should administer, blindly, without passion or prejudice, our indispensable, if imperfect, system of justice.
Day after day, however, it is becoming apparent that because of our exceptional democratic exercise among industrialized nations in America, some institutions have adopted a profile that no longer represents our social contract as a nation. It raises serious questions :
Suppose the Supreme Court of the land, our highest court to settle our disputes, is no longer apt to arbitrate the law equitably, unthinkingly, without passion or prejudice. How are we going to ensure a civilized cohabitation further? Are we to regress to older times when the rules only apply to the disenfranchised majority and did not apply to the well-connected few? Can it be considered “Supreme,” a court whose members are clearly partisan, religious fanatics, or trifling individuals motivated by greed and only responsive to their privileged financiers?
Polls after polls evidenced that the wish of the majority is to have our government address the pressing problems of our society, including the lack of accountability by our Supreme Court justices. It benefits us all when the rules of our society are equally applied. The reasons for these necessary corrections are obvious and known:
-Can Nine individuals, as superbly trained and accomplished professionals as they may be, not be subject to human frailties, passions, and prejudices?
-Can these Nine individuals represent the collective wisdom of more than three hundred twenty-five million Americans?
-Are they even physically able to handle the overwhelming number of case law debates generated by the third-largest population on this planet?
Suppose one assumes that they are really gifted individuals, to an almost inhuman level, and they can handle the job. At a very basic level, aren’t these honorable justices subject to a set of moral and ethical codes beyond and exceedingly higher than the rest of us? Empty promises to behave correctly are not substitutes for standards and rules. This one nation is still a nation of laws, after all. We don’t operate on an honor system.
As a matter of example, every professional group in this nation, to legally practice, must abide by a code of ethics sanctioned by their licensing boards, at risk, otherwise, of losing their license to practice. Isn’t the highest tribunal of the land, with the nine brightest legal minds of the nation, subject to even higher standards than regular physicians, lawyers, or accountants? Or is it that in the supreme arrogance of some of its members, they see themselves above the laws, and we must accept their words in lieu of rules and standards? A “Trust me” promise by a Supreme Court justice is not a rule or a legally binding, enforceable standard. But who is going to enforce the standards? one person asked me. “We the people”. The same one that elected the Senators that, in their circus-like nomination hearings, appointed them.
These are simple questions, and all the available solutions have been offered.
Here is the problem.
The reason why our Supreme Court problems seem insolvable, even after the most brilliant legal minds of this nation have offered reasonable solutions, is because these problems represent yet another symptom of the terminal illness afflicting this nation: Plutocratitis. – A chronic, malignant condition caused by the actions of corrupt elected officials and appointed self-serving individuals, working on behalf of their financiers, to the detriment of the whole nation’s body-.
For the past two decades, this country has developed a marked profile suggestive of a Plutocracy. The rules no longer obey a social contract; instead, they are at the service of interest groups. Whether legislating on safety issues, health care issues, education, child welfare, or women’s rights, among others, it has forsaken the will and wellbeing of the majority to benefit interest groups or business conglomerates. What we’re witnessing in primetime is an obnoxious, arrogant exercise of power by a minority superbly well-financed and legislatively connected against most of the population and a gross deterioration of Americans’ lives, safety, and health standards, among others.
The U.S. Supreme Court has surrendered its legitimacy to the brutality, corruption, and unfettered ambitions of certain groups. It is becoming evident that the USSC does not respond to the wishes of the majority, rather, little by little, it has turned itself into an instrument of coercion of the general population and perpetuation of the power of a less than one percent minority.
Can justice exist without a social contract laying down the rules and the willingness of the underwriters to abide by them?
Can we have a nation or a democracy in which the signatories of the social contract cannot agree about what’s good for the country and/or compromise for the collective wellbeing?
Can it exist a just society in which a minority cynically and brutally disregards the wishes of the majority and all rules of civilized cohabitation without being a Plutocracy?
It has become commonplace in our country to have legislation, even with bi-partisan support, on behalf of the people, to go to our supposedly August Senate to die at the hand of one or few corrupt senators, typically from states with less than five million people.
Nero is purported to have devised a now well-tested instrument of population control by giving the populace, gladiators, and entertainment to keep it appeased. Our governing class instead gives us legislation favoring Walmart, fast food, Super Bowl Sunday, unfettered access to guns, etcetera, while rendering the population morbidly obese, unsafe, indebted, uneducated, unable to get a college education, and addicted to drugs without help available.
The problems affecting our society are multiple but not intractable. But it becomes disheartening when the political discourse, in a campaign year, does not even mention in passing the pressing challenges of our time. Instead, the choices offered for November 4 are hardly representative of the collective wishes: The one candidate promises to guarantee the brutal, corrupt, immoral exercise of privilege on behalf of the less than one percent. The other gives platitudes and demagoguery and guarantees his inability to exercise moral courage on behalf of the nation, the majority, or the truth.
It is evident to me that this is no longer “One nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.” The statement now seems more aspirational than reality. The Supreme Court of this great nation is representative of such malaise and turning into just another instrument ensuring the perpetuation of the privileged few.
As a matter of conscience, notwithstanding forsaking my civic duty, perhaps as an act of civil disobedience, I refuse to legitimize a system of governance, evidently more a Plutocracy than a Democracy, that do not represent the will of the majority or offer solutions to the pressing problems of our nation. As long as, like cattle down the slaughterhouse, we participate in this travesty, we are legitimizing their corrupt mismanagement. If there was a concert where the two stellar bands perform music that is neither good nor of people’s liking, thus the majority of the public chooses not to attend their concerts, what would be of those bands?
Finally, one time during an election year, as the candidates had done for the previous decades, the candidates approached an old man in the rural south. They promised him the world, the moon, and the sky. The old man, told them, “you see that dirt road you came in here, the same one you soon will be back on, since the Nixon administration, I have been promised to be paved and each year I voted to get it paved… Please, leave my property”
I am not voting on November 4.
P.R. Thompson
June 9, 2024