Santa Claus for the Supreme Court

At least he’s generous. He’s got more credibility. Whether he exists or not doesn’t seem to matter much.

Way back in July, Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called “A Liberal’s Case for Brett Kavanaugh.” After the allegations of sex crimes emerged, Amar wrote a follow up in the Yale Daily News called “Second thoughts on Kavanaugh.”

Whatever Amar thought he was doing in these two pieces, what he actually was engaged in was propaganda. The narrow, shallow and conventional perspective on the law, history and power necessary to make these essays intelligible is clearly endorsed by both Yale and the New York Times. The problem is not whether or not Amar is wrong or not. The problem is that his version of the world, the law, and American justice is so far from reality, so divorced from what the United States is, where the constitution comes from, and how power actually works that he should be embarrassed to hold such naive and silly assumptions, like an 11-year old still believing in Santa Claus.

No one should be surprised that a gang rape guy was nominated to the Supreme Court. Whether or not a guy rapes, or lets people die, is not germane to the American system of justice. We don’t have a court system to do justice but to control the masses.

If you believe in a literal Santa Claus — that an actual fat man comes down the chimney and gives you stuff, if you can’t figure out how impossible it would be for deer to fly, for one man to make all those stops in one night — why should anyone care what you think about the Supreme Court? Amar believes in Santa Claus, the Noble American Republic of Virtue. Problem is, no such thing exists.

The propaganda machine in the United States in 2018 is so effective, and yet so poorly grounded, that they want us to accept Santa Claus (i.e. this great American republic of virtue) without question. It’s pretty effective in that liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans) agree that Santa Claus exists but pretty shallow and open to collapse in that it’s a complete and total lie.

Let’s go back to Amar’s writing to see the evidence of magical thinking. Amar says, “I strongly supported Hillary Clinton for president as well as President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. But today, with the exception of the current justices and Judge Garland, it is hard to name anyone with judicial credentials as strong as those of Judge Kavanaugh. He sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the most influential circuit court) and commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers and jurists.”

Here there are two nonsensical ideological assumptions that need to be unpacked. One, “I strongly supported” the Democrat is Amar’s proof that he is a liberal, open-minded or somehow fair. In fact, his naive acceptance of the two-party con job that is American politics shows that the author is not aware of how the American system actually works and seems to be able to watch CNN with a straight face as do the Alzheimer patients in the nursing home.

We do not have two parties with two sets of valid perspective — left and right, Democrat and Republican — but a system of fake elections with two corporate-approved candidates representing only the interests of a small group of elites competing on a narrow range of pre-approved issues. My view (“fake democracy”) has evidence to support the position while Amar’s view (“noble republic”) cannot be established with evidence.

That I am right — American democracy is a farce — and Amar is wrong — that there is a valid range of opinion represented by the two camps of competing elites — is proved by the Princeton Study of 2014 “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Now, you might say, that is only one study. Okay: so where is the study that shows that since 60 to 70% of the American people want Medicare for all, they have Medicare for all? No such study can exist because what the people of the US want or don’t want has zero relationship to what the US government does. This is a fact. It is in an inconvenient fact for the New York Times, Yale and Amar, but it is nevertheless a fact.

You see what I’m doing in this essay? It’s not that Amar says things that are true or not true in his essay. You can say true stuff in propaganda pieces. You can write propaganda and not even know that you are writing propaganda, as in the case of Amar. His fundamental world-view, not his specific arguments, indeed his whole career, indeed the reputation of the New York Times and Yale University, indeed the entire US government, are all based on the existence of Santa Claus, the Noble Republic. If there is no Noble Republic but a shadowy fraud, then you need to note that in every essay you write or you are writing propaganda.

But his acceptance of the two-party system as something legitimate is only the first and relatively minor ideological missteps Amar makes in his opening paragraph. The more serious insanity comes from his statement that Kavanaugh “commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers and jurists.” This statement is appalling, grotesque and offensive. It’s a slap in the face. It’s monarchical. It’s anti-democratic. It’s gross.

Really? All he said was his peers like this guy Kavanaugh. No, that’s not what he said… take a deep breath. Were I not to breath and slow down I might say fuck all scholars, lawyers and jurists who respect Kavanaugh. Second, fuck all scholars, lawyers and jurists who think the Supreme Court is for them to play with and it’s theirs... But wait… that is not polite. Scholars, lawyers and jurists loves them some polite. If you’re not polite, whoa, they gunna come for you.

The Supreme Court has always been a political court. No one can dispute that. What scholars, lawyers and jurists write or don’t write to get themselves on or not on the Supreme Court is all irrelevant. The court exists to provide elites the power to control the masses. The Supreme Court defended slavery, then the Supreme Court was second only to the KKK in undermining the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments after the Civil War, the court stood against the 8-hour work day, against laws against child labor, in favor of Nazi-style sterilization campaigns, against the Jehovah witnesses’ when they were being lynched, caused ten thousand Black teachers to lose their jobs with the Brown v. Board of Ed decision, and has never been a force for good or justice.

It’s not surprising the Supreme Court has always been for the powerful against the weak: that’s what the Founding Fathers wanted. The new Constitution in 1784 was shocking to many for the power of the federal courts, far beyond the powers of any existing court system in the new states or back in England. But that power was no accident: the Constitution is meant to create a republican system which allows for oligarchic and elite wealth and control. That’s always been the court’s job. State courts cannot be trusted to always side with the elite. Federal courts, on the other hand, have a much better track record of oppression.

What I am saying here about how power works in our system is absolutely correct. To fully prove that the Constitution and the federal courts exist to prevent democratic movements from getting real power I would need a bit more space and more of your time than you probably bargained for when you clicked the link to my piece here. Nevertheless, proving the political nature of the court, the elite power inherent in the system of federal courts, and the anti-democratic impulses of the Founding Fathers is not hard to do. And people who want to know the truth can find it out. Amar is not among those who care to know. You can see my other pieces here, for example.

Here is Amar again: “Most judges are not scholars or even serious readers of scholarship. Judge Kavanaugh, by contrast, has taught courses at leading law schools and published notable law review articles. More important, he is an avid consumer of legal scholarship. He reads and learns. And he reads scholars from across the political spectrum. (Disclosure: I was one of Judge Kavanaugh’s professors when he was a student at Yale Law School.)”

Amar and Kavanaugh are buddies. Okay, fine, but has Amar ever been in a courtroom? Does he really think what is going on in American courts is some kind of dialogue over justice? Where ‘scholarship’ and an open engagement in ideas defines what actually happens in some way in the courtroom? I don’t know what courtroom he’s been in but it’s not the one the rest of us know.

273 people convicted of murder including 17 death row inmates have been exonerated by use of DNA tests. Judicial “scholarship” didn’t help at all. The people in the trenches who did the holy work of exonerating the innocent are not getting nominated to the federal bench. Why? Justice is not what the bench is for.

How can a judge on the top of a system that takes a healthy man out of a cell, walks him down the hall, then kills him when he did not commit any crime be a “scholar” and “respected”? Or do you think that DNA testing saved the day and no innocent people have ever been executed in the United States? If you are on top of the system that kills people like that, you are responsible for it. If you can stop it, you have to. No amount of sustained silent reading is going to make up for the bad grade your soul will get for participating in evil.

Kavanaugh, Amar says, “reads scholars from across the political spectrum.” I highly doubt that Amar himself reads anything outside of a narrow range, a little nice circle jerk of elite phonies. If he did, his assumptions would not be those of the New York Times and Yale Law School, apparently, that everything is fine in the Noble Republic of Santa Claus. Does Amar know that there are people who don’t like the Supreme Court at all? Did he read their scholarship?

When the Jeronimo Yanez shot Philandro Castille and walked free with a $48,000 buy out from his job with the Minneapolis police, where was Brent Kavanaugh? Akhil Amar? Reading their wide range of scholarship? Did anything on the reading list cover 400 years of state violence based on race? And if they read it, and it was true, why didn’t it change them?

Kavanaugh went to a private prep school where he tried to rape girls, then went to Yale, raped some more, or tried, then got moved along by this system so that he could be in place for his Supreme Court nomination as the acceptably young age of 53, given lifetime appointments. He knows nothing. He never learned anything. Scholarship?

He doesn’t understand economics. He is clueless about science. He has never been broke. He doesn’t know about dairy farming, or plumbing, and can’t fix his own car. He doesn’t know the difference between the columns on the periodic table, or how contraception works, and has no idea that other countries have justice systems too, many of which dispense more justice than we do in America. He has never heard of Ida B. Wells. He can’t justify Dred Scott 1857 (ruling black people aren’t citizens), Plessy v. Ferguson (allowing separate-but-equal) 1896, Buck v. Bell 1927 (permitting compulsory sterilization), and Korematsu v. United States 1944 (upholding Japanese internment camps), Slaughter-House Cases / United States v. Cruikshank 1873 / 1875 (undoing Reconstruction), Chae Chan Ping v. United States 1889 (upholding Chinese exclusion act), Bowers v. Hardwick 1986 (allowing laws against homosexual), Lochner v. New York 1905 (against workers rights), Hammer v. Dagenhart 1918 (voiding child labor law), Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission 1992 (preventing the protection of the environment), Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker 2008 (increased Exxon stock by 23 billion in one day), Citizens United v. FEC 2010 (big money politics).

If there were a Santa Claus, Amar and Kavanaugh wouldn’t read what he wrote because he isn’t a “scholar.” He wouldn’t get nominated to the Supreme Court.

But there is no Santa Claus. There is no Noble Republic. Propaganda is propaganda. You can stamp “Yale” and “New York Times” on nonsense all you want, there still is no Santa.

Given Georgetown Preps and Yale’s wimpy response to evidence of rape culture at their institutions, along with the shallow and callous character of their graduates and faculty, I proposed the income derived from the endowments and donations given to private schools of all kinds be taxed and the income derived from these taxes be shared with public high schools, universities and colleges to make sure everyone gets a quality education, regardless of family background.

Prep boys like Kavanaugh have enough stuff already. Toys, privilege, hell, they think they are entitled to pussy when they were born with dicks. The courts should be for the people and the mere fact that he went to Georgetown Prep and never gave back to the people disqualifies him from the court, let alone that he’s a rapist.