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.

 

Birthday Luncheon

Last month, I submitted a flash fiction entry to a contest by Writers' Advice.  I didn't win, but I did get honorable mention.  I was very happy with that and will continue to participate in the contests.  For a small fee, they'll give you feedback about your submission.  It's worth it to me to have that advice.

I'd posted this before under a different title.  I like this title better.

Birthday Luncheon

 

It really pisses me off when I have to waste my free time feeling bored.    Why do I have to go to family lunches and stuff like that?  No one talks to me, well, hardly ever.  Today we had to go because it’s Nana’s birthday.  I don’t even know how old Nana is!  My father got out of it because he works.  I told my mom I needed to do homework and she said she didn’t want to hear it because it’s Saturday and I can do it tomorrow.  It’s not fair.

At least the restaurant we went to is kind of fun.  It has all kinds of cool things up on the walls.  There’s a really old bicycle.  It has to be ancient because it doesn’t even have any brakes on the handles.  There’s a lot of pictures of people from olden times.  Some of them look like movie pictures.  There’s a really rough looking guy in a big cowboy hat.  He’s laughing about something.  Maybe someone called him beautiful – not!  There’s also a guy wearing a raincoat and a brown slouch hat almost down over his eyes.  He’s really ugly – and old.  There are sports things up there, too – a hockey stick and a baseball mitt.  The weirdest thing up there is someone’s arm sticking out of the wall.  I guess it’s from a dummy model but I wonder why they just stuck an arm up there?  Where did the rest of it go?

My mother and Nana yakked across the table while I looked around the room at all the cool stuff.  Brian kicked me under the table.  I stuck my tongue out at him but he was pointing to something over our heads.  It was just an old airplane.  So, what.  He was trying to tell me something but I wouldn’t look at him.  Brothers are so stupid, especially the older ones.  They think they know everything.

I was bored so I grabbed a dessert menu off the table and opened it up.    At first, I didn’t understand why all the desserts were in tall float glasses and then I realized that this was a drink menu.  I didn’t want Brian to know that I made a mistake so I kept looking at it just long enough to be able to put it back down without getting all embarrassed.

When I looked up, I saw the waiter standing by Brian’s shoulder.  He was writing and Brian’s mouth was moving, telling the waiter what he wanted.   I tapped my mother on the shoulder but she was still talking to Nana.  Why didn’t she tell me the waiter was there?  I tapped her again but she held her hand up. I hate it when they do that.  They don’t ever bother to talk to us and they expect us to just sit there and be polite.  I tapped her again, harder.

“WHAT?” my mother signed to me, looking exasperated.  “What do you want?”

I fingerspelled: “S-p-r-i-t-e.”

 

Democratic Leaders: Are You Sleeping?

I don’t feel so good about my country.  I watched a YouTube video. It showed the first portion of Senator Whitehouse (of RI)’s presentation to the Senate about a fifty-odd year old plot layout to have corporations take control of government by subverting the Supreme Court.  It was written by William Powell before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.  His memo is also here:but I have to admit it was easier for me to understand by watching Senator Whitehouse explain it.

Backstep: I’ve always been an avid reader.  When I was a senior and about to graduate from high school, my favorite author was Taylor Caldwell.  She’s written many excellent books and now that I’m thinking about her, I want to go back and re-read her stuff.  I started to read her first novel, Dynasty of Death,  because the description sounded intriguing: two brothers in conflict.  I got more from the story than that! 

Caldwell wrote about a worldwide conspiracy of the CEOs of businesses and corporations to take control of their governments.  The conspirators had a long range plan for accomplishing this.  In addition, they planned wars in different locations at different times.  Wars are very profitable for business and that was the bottom line: wealth and power.  I remember how it opened my eyes.  Fiction?  Yes, but what if this was really happening?

Another book by the same author, Captains and the Kings, was similar in many ways.  To be honest, it felt like a fictional Kennedy story.  The patriarch, Joseph, immigrated to the United States from Ireland.  He worked his way up to the head of his own company, through determination and a definite lack of empathy.  There was a similar conspiracy of businesses with the same purpose: a quiet takeover of the company.  Similarities to the Kennedy family: a “curse” follows the family.  Joseph grooms oldest son Rory to become the first Catholic President of the United States.  However, Rory is too liberal for the conspirators and someone among them has Rory assassinated.

Ok, back to present time:  as I watched the videos, I immediately thought of those two books.  Justice Powell had written the blueprint for GQP behavior today.  The plan had to be implemented very slowly, insidiously, over five decades.  Slowly, slowly the GOP moved to obstruct and block legislation that would “harm” big business or that would help middle class citizens.  Fifty years ago, I had other things on my mind and wasn’t paying much attention to politics.  Except for Watergate, I can’t remember the squabbling between the parties that we’re seeing today.  Soon after Powell sent his memo out, Republicans got hold of it.  I remember that President Nixon nominated Powell for the Supreme Court.

I imagine that’s when the poisoning of the court began.

Then Majority Leader “Moscow” Mitch McDonnell sealed the evil deal of packing SCOTUS with conservatives by refusing to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee to the court after Antonin Scalia died.  Obama chose Merrick Garland, and McConnell declared he wouldn’t hold any hearings until after the 2020 election.  As a result of this illegal maneuver (that apparently no one tried to stop), tRump was able to pack the court with ultra right wing screwballs.

In the next session, SCOTUS agreed to hear a case that could totally change the way we have elections.  The case is called Moore vs. Harper.  The Rethugs in NC came up with a redistricting plan that only served to profit them and the state court threw out their maps.  The Rethugs sued, claiming that throwing the maps out was a violation of the Constitution’s election clause.

“In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.”

Really?  That means anything goes in an election.  If we don’t like who got the popular vote, we just throw them out so “our guy” wins.  This has the potential of completely overturning democracy.  Voting is our only power.  It’s take away if authorities decide they don’t want a particular set of votes counted.

It would be a total disaster.

But no one is talking about it.  The Democratic leaders are dismayingly quiet or blowing useless raspberries.  Nothing is being done.  It’s going to happen because everyone at the top is sleeping at the wheel.  I’ll have to write to my reps, the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader about this.  They can’t sit on the hands anymore, wishing it would all just go away.

It’ll go away, all right, but if no action is taken, no one will be free.