Distress Signal

Distress Signal

Our flag is flying upside down.  We are not unpatriotic; we are in distress over the dangers we are facing now.  Women in red states will be losing freedom of choice about whether they’ll carry a pregnancy to birth.  The rogue Supreme Court seems to be bent on undoing more of our fundamental rights, like the right to contraception for crying out loud!  Even more sinister, the right to gay marriage or interracial marriage, Brown vs. Board of Education, and many others are now in danger of being overturned. I am reading and learning as much as I can about this new case they want to hear in the next session.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is not all SCOTUS has done.  Although gun violence is the leading cause of deaths in children, they’ve overturned a gun control law in New York.  They claim it’s a violation of the Second Amendment.  Basically, it means people can carry their guns around.  Go to the grocery store and you don’t know if the angry person behind you is buying groceries or about to pull out a gun and start shooting.  Although a gun bill was finally passed on the federal level, will it stand?

If that wasn’t enough, SCOTUS also gave a big fuck you to planet earth.  Reform was so slow to begin with and we’re already almost at the point of no way can Earth recover.  Legislators being supported by the fuel industry have always been reluctant to change.  Meanwhile, we are having climate change causing stronger storms and much hotter weather.  What kind of world are we leaving to our great grandchildren?

Our democracy is in danger.  It has been since long before January 6^th as witness that secret memo from Lewis Powell way back in 1971.  I wrote about it earlier.  Powell laid out a long-term strategic plan to convert democracy to an oligarchy.  I would say that he and the Rethugs have succeeded there.  The country now is powered by the 1%, the billionaires who can afford to bribe because they pay minimal taxes.  Do we have a middle class anymore?  Doesn’t seem like it.

Slowly, slowly like spiders build their webs and like cats wait, watching their prey, the Rethuglicans have been infiltrating their right-wing radicals and nuts everywhere, from local school boards to city councils to state legislatures to Congress and to the Supreme Court.  Slowly, slowly “judges” Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts have been raised up to their ranks to being nominated and approved onto the “Extreme Court.”

Thomas wrote in a separate opinion that he’d like to see cases related to same sex marriage, contraception, and consensual sexual acts brought up so that the Court could overturn those rights too.  His opinion that those rights are wrong and need to be corrected.  Of course, he didn’t bring up interracial marriage: he is Black and his treacherous wife Ginni is white. 

That’s plenty scary.

The more I read about this new case for next year, the more my hair stands on end and I break out into goose bumps of anxiety.

Remember good old Judge Luttig?  He wrote an opinion piece for CNN some months ago, warning us that Rethugs and GQP would continuing trying to steal elections until they succeed.  Most recently, tRump etal’s plot included having SCOTUS adopt an idea called independent state legislature.

This is the concept I’ve been trying to fully understand.

This quote comes from an article I read in an NBC article this morning:

““The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state presidential electors,” Luttig explained. “Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.””

The link to that article is here https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/supreme-court-consider-radical-independent-legislature-theory-rcna36301?cid=eml_mda_20220703&user_email=13660bfeb26f12d44f84b122ca5ed8d5f1acd1ca439a25e7fe835ee487c11d11

How we vote has been in place forever.  We the people vote and then there are people set up along the way to count our votes and verify them.  We have a census poll that helps to draw and redraw congressional district boundaries.  That’s what started the case before the Supreme Court.  Rethuglicans in South Carolina drew up district boundaries heavily favoring themselves.  Their maps were thrown out.  The thugs appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, who will hear this case.

So, if they decide in favor of this independent state legislature concept, it means that our votes would become meaningless.  Why?  Because that particular piece from the clause says that if state legislatures in red states didn’t like the outcome of the election, they could invalidate (throw out) the votes.  They would bypass everything in place that’s supposed to protect our votes and, worse, state courts wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. 

That is really and truly scary.  Think about it.  The party in control of the state legislature (in Rethug states) could decide an election because they could choose their own electors to present to the Electoral College.

With the Rethugs in control, they could do all kinds of draconian shenanigans in addition to taking away our rights.  All these years, we’ve been contributing a portion of our salaries for Social Security and Medicare.  They want to take those away and have said so openly.  Some of the more openly racist legislators have talked about overturning Brown vs. Board of Education, Plessy vs. Ferguson and on and on until we’re back to the white-old-days when women were subservient and people of color knew their place.

It's absolutely horrifying.

I don’t understand why more people aren’t up in arms.  Ostrich syndrome, I call it.  They go about their daily lives as if nothing important was going on.  It’s really way past time for people to WAKE UP.