The Supreme Court undermined and sabotaged the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, enabling Jim Crow

The Supreme Court undermined and sabotaged the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, enabling Jim Crow; and it is now undoing the Civil Rights Act and the Affordable Care Act: "The nation’s founding document is no match for a dedicated majority of justices committed to circumventing its guarantees," writes Adam Serwer.

Why wasn’t the Fourteenth Amendment enough to prevent Jim Crow? Why was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 needed, and the additional measure of protected class? The Supreme Court undid the equal protection clause, preparing the way for Jim Crow, by ruling in 1873 (_United States v. Cruikshank_) that “the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state.”

Adam Serwer:

"Seventy-two men were ultimately indicted for their role in the Colfax massacre [over 100 black people slaughtered], charged under the Enforcement Acts of 1870, which were passed to help the federal government suppress the Ku Klux Klan. But their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the federal government lacked the authority to charge the perpetrators. Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote that the United States had not clearly stated that the accused, in slaughtering more than 100 black men, had “committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, argued the Grant-appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, because the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state. “The only obligation resting upon the United States is to see that the States do not deny the right,” Waite wrote. “This the amendment guarantees, but no more. The power of the national government is limited to the enforcement of this guaranty.” … 

"This decision, in United States v. Cruikshank, the legal historian Lawrence Goldstone argues, provided a guide for the campaign of racist terrorism that would suppress the black vote and enshrine a white man’s government for generations. “The Colfax defendants would have had to announce their plan to violate their victims’ rights on account of the color of their skin in order to be culpable,” Goldstone wrote. “Justice Bradley had thus communicated to any Redeemer with violent intent that to avoid federal prosecution one need simply to keep one’s mouth shut before committing murder.”

Grant was enraged that “insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers … and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice.”" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption-court/566963/

the Supreme Court is not a sacred body if it is bent toward politics rather than justice.

It has been said that having a sacred document (the Constitution), Americans need a sacred body to administer it.

But the Supreme Court is not a sacred body if it is bent toward politics rather than justice.

It is now routinely said that many are holding their noses and continuing to support the person in the White House because he will appoint Republican judges at the Supreme Court and intermediate levels. Let’s think about that for a moment. The movie "A Man for All Seasons" addressed the rule of law:

"[Sir Thomas] More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake."

But if the law is reduced to a sordid matter of "Republican judges" or "Democratic judges," the laws are down. We no longer have a polity of "laws, not men."

Where will you hide, "the laws all being flat? … Do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

How Ronald Reagan Turned the Supreme Court Into a Partisan Timebomb

The Federalist Society is now choosing the Republican party’s Supreme Court nominees, making sure that the pool the president selects from consists of partisan activists who deliver, not even-handed justice, but minority rule by a radical right coterie.

Judicial review has come to be a tool of reactionary power which can prevent any democratically enacted law from taking effect, so that there is no longer separation of powers, but kritarchy: rule by judges. Unelected judges. Democracy dies.

All democracy is inherently liberal, all justice is liberal, all genuine intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal. In the past, even justices selected by Republican presidents — "William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, David Souter, Earl Warren, and John Paul Stevens" — "drifted" to the impartial center, because they were even-handed jurists, not ideologues.

The Federalist Society is engineering a radical transformation so that the Supreme Court no longer embodies high principles, but will become a squalid entourage of cynical, debased operatives dispensing supreme bigotry and avarice.

Documentation: The URL below (or listen to the podcast). Example:

"Despite President Donald Trump’s high disapproval rating, it’s almost a certainty that his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, will be confirmed to the high court. And it’s no surprise—former President Ronald Reagan took steps to make the court a major issue for Republican voters, something that led to the rise of the conservative Federalist Society, which has spent years sourcing and grooming potential justices. In all practical senses, the 40th president laid the groundwork for blocking Merrick Garland, and getting Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court."

"[Kavanaugh] is moved around by the political winds. He’s not just a jurist off in some ivory tower, thinking dispassionately about the law."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/brett-kavanagh-has-ronald-reagan-to-thank-for-twisting-the-supreme-court.html

[A transcription of The Political Gabfest podcast for Wednesday, August 22, 2018, “The Eight-Count Edition”]

President in name only

Stop referring to him as “the president.”

The Founders were quite clear: any president must swear and affirm an Oath of Office to protect and defend the Constitution.

You’d think they believed that a habitual, inveterate, compulsive, vicious liar, a man utterly without shame in his constant prevarication, could not be president.

Back when lower courts, through several iterations of anti-immigration executive orders, blocked each diktat from the Oval Office, Quinta Jurecic of Lawfareblog mused that the nation’s administrators of justice, reflecting on the gravity of the Oath, felt that he who had sworn it lacked “civic virtue,” and was not entitled to normal presidential deference.

The squatter who currently, through a catastrophic quirk of the Electoral College, holds the highest office of the land in Babylonian captivity, had formal authority but was as lacking in moral authority as he was lacking in dignity, judgment, and common human decency.

How many kinds of disgusting does one have to be to so besmirch the noble office once held by Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, cavorting on the national stage, smirking, bullying, threatening, hurling kindergarten epithets at the press, the judiciary, at petitioners for refuge?

Each time we attach the name of a high office to a miserable creature who stiffed his contractors, defrauded citizens who sought to better themselves with a fake university, and betrayed the marriage vow with playmates and porn stars, we impute the virtue of the presidency to one who has none.