FOURTH OF JULY REFLECTIONS

 

I wanted to wish all of my fellow Americans a happy Fourth of July yesterday…but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Couldn’t muster any happiness about what’s happening in my native country today. It’s all just too grim.

Maybe it’s the weather. Here in Patagonia, it’s raining and snowing, cold and dark. It’s more fitting of the state of my nation—once the beacon of democracy, the temple of individual rights—than a sunny day full of brass bands, fireworks, picnics and beer.

But then again, if we give any thought at all to the actual significance of the Fourth of July, we Americans—at least every small-d democrat among us—should have been in mourning yesterday. Not for our origins, which were noble, but for what we’ve lost along the way, and especially what we’ve lost in the last five and a half years.

I would like to say—have wanted to say since January 20, 2020—not to worry. That things can only get better. But that appears to be a fatuous lie. Indeed, in terms of freedom, civil rights and justice, we are abysmally worse off than we were just last month. With the far-right in Congress throwing their full support behind an insurrection that—let’s stop pussyfooting around and call it like it is—sought to overthrow the government of the United States and perpetuate the reign of an autocrat who had clearly lost a free and fair election, and with that self-same autocrat refusing for the first time in US history to leave office peacefully after his election defeat, the Supreme Court was the last bastion standing against this indubitable war on democracy and what used to be known as “The American Way”. But in the last days of June before the Fourth of July recess, that ship clearly sailed as well.

Events in that democratic bloodbath at the Supreme Court in the fateful last days in June included a judicial restructuring that very apparently sought to bolster the ambitions of one segment of the population while debilitating the rights of another. In the process, the power of the Court—like the GOP before it—was unmistakably usurped by the far right, effectively sidelining the normally moderating influence of the chief justice. That institution’s erstwhile principles of respect for settled judicial precedent when it favors individual freedoms, as well as for legally acquired rights, were cavalierly tossed out the window.

This was the intended mission that former President Donald Trump—and the major party that he managed in a few short years to take over through a veritable political reign of terror—hoped the three justices they named to the Court would take up. They haven’t been disappointed. And those newly appointed justices have found an echo for their extreme beliefs in senior Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who was previously a sort of judicial lone wolf in his far-right opinions.

In the latter days of June, and in practically one fell swoop, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down one of the most essential of women’s civil rights—the right to autonomy over their own bodies and their own destiny. This was a hard-fought right that had been federal law in the United States for very nearly a half-century.

With the exception of the right to vote, which women didn’t enjoy for the first time until 1920, and which was a mere first small step in their equal rights struggle that continues today, Roe v Wade was arguably the most consequential decision in favor or women’s rights in the history of the United States. It eschewed the political and religious strictures that had been imposed on women since the nation’s founding (a sort of Christian “sharia law” that precluded a woman’s right to corporeal autonomy), and upheld the right of women to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice.”

Coco Das, an organizer with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, put it succinctly when she told The Guardian, “This decision not only goes against the will of the people—the majority of people support abortion rights, legal abortion—it goes against modern progress, the progress of history.” Das describe the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v Wade as being “based on biblical literalism, a fundamentalist Christian fanatical movement.” As I said before, the equivalent of Christian “sharia law”. She added that the Court’s so-called “conservative” majority are “really trying to transform (American) society to one that’s dominated on the basis of white supremacy, male supremacy, Christian supremacy. It’s very dangerous. Without the right to abortion, women can’t be free, and if women aren’t free, nobody’s free.”

But the Court didn’t stop there in its June onslaught in favor of the extreme right. Its far-right justices also ruled in majority decisions against states’ rights when it comes to arms control, against environmental protection, against Native tribal law, and against the founding constitutional principle of separation of Church and State.  

The Court ruled to disallow a 1911 New York state gun law that imposed strict restrictions on carrying firearms outside the home. The decision, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, came halfway through a year in which the US has suffered a record three hundred nine mass shooting incidents in which two hundred twenty people have died. In his opinion, echoed by the “conservative” Court majority, Justice Thomas posited that New York laws that recognized people’s right to keep guns in their homes, but restricted the right to carry them freely in the street without good cause violated the “right to bear arms” embodied in the Second Amendment.

The Court also voted in favor of a former high school football coach who was suspended for praying with athletes on the field after games, a practice which imposes religious manifestations on secular public school activities and flies in the face of a sixty-year-old precedent indicating that imposing prayer of any kind on public school children violates their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The justices also rejected a Maine law that prohibited religious schools from drawing tuition aid from public funds. In her dissent against this measure, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.” 

And finally, the Court also in June moved against a long-held precedent of tribal law on Native land and curbed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to pursue major polluters. The rightist majority decided that, from now on, state prosecutors will be able to pursue criminal cases for crimes perpetrated by non-Native persons against Native persons on tribal land—a decision which, according to Cherokee Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr, signifies that “the US Supreme Court (has) ruled against legal precedent and (against) the basic principles of congressional authority and Indian law.” The next day, the Court decided to support litigation brought by West Virginia that insisted the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be restricted in its regulation of planet-heating gasses from the energy industry.

Regarding this last measure, former New York Mayor and current special envoy to the UN Michael Bloomberg said, “The decision to side with polluters over the public will cost American lives and cause an enormous amount of preventable suffering, with the biggest burden falling on low-income communities and communities of color.” 

Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization’s center on Global Health Law made a realistic assessment of the current situation in the US when he said, “We’re absolutely in a constitutional crisis. And our democracy is now one of the most fragile democracies among our peer nations. We haven’t fallen over the cliff—we still abide by the rule of law, more or less, and still have elections, more or less—but the terms of our democracy have really been eviscerated by the Supreme Court.”

This is not a conspiracy theory. The lines of what’s happening have been sharply drawn. Never, since the Civil War, has the United States been so deeply divided, or so in danger of democratic dissolution. To my mind, then, this year’s Fourth of July was the saddest in all of my seventy-two years. I’m fervently hoping that better, more democratic times lie ahead, but I won’t hold my breath while I wait.