Mark Joseph Stern wrote recently in Slate about the dangers embedded in the Supreme Court’s Carson v. Makin decision. In this decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Maine was compelled to pay tuition at religious schools because it paid tuition at some other private schools. Stern warns that the Supreme Court is very likely to extend this concept to every state that underwrites nonsectarian private schools. The Court’s zeal for religious schools is not going to end in Maine. Please open the link and read the entire article. Make no mistake: This Supreme Court is determined to abolish any separation between church and state and to require every state to pay for religious education. So you don’t want your tax dollars to underwrite a school that would not admit your own children or grandchildren; too bad. So you don’t want to pay for Madrassas, yeshivas, or schools that teach racial hatred? Too bad.
The Republican majority on the Supreme Court claims it is dedicated to the principles of the Original Constitution, as written. They say they are Constitutional fundamentalists. This decision demonstrates how phony their “Originalism” is. The Founding Fathers were very explicit in their desire to separate religion from the state. This Court is not dedicated to the Constitution or its principles. If it were, it would never have written this decision.
He writes:
The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional. Its 6–3 decision in Carson v. Makin requires Maine to give public money to private religious schools, steamrolling decades of precedent in a race to compel state funding of religion. Carson is radical enough on its own, but the implications of the ruling are even more frightening: As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent, it has the potential to dismantle secular public education in the United States.
Carson challenges Maine’s effort to provide quality civic education to every child in the state. The government created a tuition assistance program to help families who live in remote, sparsely populated regions without any public schools. Under the program, parents can send their kids to certain private schools, and the state covers the cost of tuition. To qualify, these schools must give students a secular education. They may be affiliated with, or even run by, a religious organization. But their actual curricula must align with secular state standards.
Two families challenged this limitation, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Just two decades ago, this claim would’ve been laughed out of court: SCOTUS only permitted states to subsidize religious schools in 2002; at the time, it would’ve been absurd to say that states have a constitutional obligation to subsidize them. Beginning in 2017, the court began to assert that states may not exclude religious schools from public benefits that are available to their secular counterparts. And in 2020, the conservative justices forced states to subsidize religious schools once they began subsidizing secular private education.
Tuesday’s decision in Carson takes this radical theory to a new extreme, ordering Maine to extend public education funds to religious indoctrination.
The upshot of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court is that states have no compelling interest in providing public, secular education to children. Indeed, Roberts suggests that the very concept of secular schooling is a smokescreen for “discrimination against religion”—a pretext for unconstitutional animus toward pious Americans. His opinion reaches far beyond Maine. About 37 states have amendments to their constitutions that bar government funding of religious institutions, including schools. Carson essentially invalidates those laws while undermining the broader constitutional basis for the nation’s public school system.
Roberts reached this astonishing result by overruling broad swaths of precedent respecting states’ authority to separate church and state more strictly than the U.S. Constitution requires. The court previously upheld states’ interest in avoiding the “establishment” of religion by refusing to underwrite the indoctrination of students into a particular faith. No longer. Roberts condemned Maine’s efforts to guard against religious establishment as nothing more than “discrimination against religion”—an effort to “exclude some members of the community” from public benefits “because of their religious exercise.” He also overruled a line of cases that let the government withhold funding on the basis of religious use (like indoctrination) but not religious status (like affiliation with a church). That distinction, he wrote, “lacks a meaningful application not only in theory, but in practice as well,” tossing it in the precedential dumpster.
The chief justice maintained that Carson’s rule only kicks in once a state starts sending taxpayer dollars to private schools through vouchers, tax credits, or scholarships. So, in theory, a state can send all its money to public schools and avoid constitutional concerns. Even if that’s true, the consequences are sweeping: Most states offer at least one of these programs, so Carson gives millions of families an opportunity to bail out of the public school system and demand public money for parochial education...
It’s worth pausing, as both Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor did in dissent, to reflect on the victims of Tuesday’s decision. The two Maine schools that may now receive public funding are openly discriminatory, expelling students and teachers who do not adhere to evangelical Christianity. LGBTQ students, as well as straight children of same-sex couples, are not welcome, nor are LGBTQ teachers. Even custodians must be born-again Christians. One school teaches students to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion” and believe that men serve as the head of the household. Another requires students to sign a “covenant” promising to glorify Jesus Christ and attend weekly religious services.
The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional. Its 6–3 decision in Carson v. Makin requires Maine to give public money to private religious schools, steamrolling decades of precedent in a race to compel state funding of religion. Carson is radical enough on its own, but the implications of the ruling are even more frightening: As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent, it has the potential to dismantle secular public education in the United States.
Carson challenges Maine’s effort to provide quality civic education to every child in the state. The government created a tuition assistance program to help families who live in remote, sparsely populated regions without any public schools. Under the program, parents can send their kids to certain private schools, and the state covers the cost of tuition. To qualify, these schools must give students a secular education. They may be affiliated with, or even run by, a religious organization. But their actual curricula must align with secular state standards.
Two families challenged this limitation, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Just two decades ago, this claim would’ve been laughed out of court: SCOTUS only permitted states to subsidize religious schools in 2002; at the time, it would’ve been absurd to say that states have a constitutional obligation to subsidize them. Beginning in 2017, the court began to assert that states may not exclude religious schools from public benefits that are available to their secular counterparts. And in 2020, the conservative justices forced states to subsidize religious schools once they began subsidizing secular private education.
Tuesday’s decision in Carson takes this radical theory to a new extreme, ordering Maine to extend public education funds to religious indoctrination.
The upshot of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court is that states have no compelling interest in providing public, secular education to children. Indeed, Roberts suggests that the very concept of secular schooling is a smokescreen for “discrimination against religion”—a pretext for unconstitutional animus toward pious Americans. His opinion reaches far beyond Maine. About 37 states have amendments to their constitutions that bar government funding of religious institutions, including schools. Carson essentially invalidates those laws while undermining the broader constitutional basis for the nation’s public school system.
Roberts reached this astonishing result by overruling broad swaths of precedent respecting states’ authority to separate church and state more strictly than the U.S. Constitution requires. The court previously upheld states’ interest in avoiding the “establishment” of religion by refusing to underwrite the indoctrination of students into a particular faith. No longer. Roberts condemned Maine’s efforts to guard against religious establishment as nothing more than “discrimination against religion”—an effort to “exclude some members of the community” from public benefits “because of their religious exercise.” He also overruled a line of cases that let the government withhold funding on the basis of religious use (like indoctrination) but not religious status (like affiliation with a church). That distinction, he wrote, “lacks a meaningful application not only in theory, but in practice as well,” tossing it in the precedential dumpster.…
The chief justice maintained that Carson’s rule only kicks in once a state starts sending taxpayer dollars to private schools through vouchers, tax credits, or scholarships. So, in theory, a state can send all its money to public schools and avoid constitutional concerns. Even if that’s true, the consequences are sweeping: Most states offer at least one of these programs, so Carson gives millions of families an opportunity to bail out of the public school system and demand public money for parochial education.
But can this distinction hold? Roberts’ bright line dims under scrutiny: Maine, after all, wanted private schools to replace public education for some students, not supplement it. And yet the court found no good reason for the state to insist that these substitute schools adhere to secular standards. Indeed, the chief justice’s rhetoric depicts education not as a state-sponsored benefit for all, but rather as a personal matter best left up to parents. There is, he claimed, no “historic and substantial state interest” in preserving secular education. If that’s true, how can any state refuse to fund religious schooling?…
It’s worth pausing, as both Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor did in dissent, to reflect on the victims of Tuesday’s decision. The two Maine schools that may now receive public funding are openly discriminatory, expelling students and teachers who do not adhere to evangelical Christianity. LGBTQ students, as well as straight children of same-sex couples, are not welcome, nor are LGBTQ teachers. Even custodians must be born-again Christians. One school teaches students to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion” and believe that men serve as the head of the household. Another requires students to sign a “covenant” promising to glorify Jesus Christ and attend weekly religious services….
“Legislators,” Breyer wrote, “did not want Maine taxpayers to pay for these religiously based practices,” as doing so might violate their own faith or conscience. The majority tells these Mainers their own views don’t matter, because the First Amendment forces them to foot the bill for other people’s religious indoctrination. Doing so creates a “serious risk of religion-based social divisions,” Breyer explained, exacerbating the “religious strife” that the religion clauses “were designed to prevent.” Sotomayor put the point more sharply: “While purporting to protect against discrimination of one kind,” she wrote, “the court requires Maine to fund what many of its citizens believe to be discrimination of other kinds.”
The conservative majority, however, has perfected the art of ignoring genuine discrimination while perceiving anti-Christian persecution where none exists. In the process, they are elevating the rights of one sect over all others. Carson will not benefit any religious minorities; there are not enough Muslims or Jews to create a school in the far-flung corners of Maine. Every time Roberts uses the word “religion,” he might as well be saying “Christian.” The right will praise Carson as a triumph of religious liberty. But if you practice a religion that does not stand to gain from the ruling, your liberty does not matter to this Supreme Court.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I keep a copy of the Constitution in my travel backpack and one on my desk. I always have one around me. I read it about 4-5 times a year on flights and other parts countless times. Read it again this morning. If you haven’t, give it a read. It’s not long. Then you’ll have reason to shake your head about how little the people who are most responsible for maintaining it understand or care about what’s actually in it and how it has been lived throughout our history.
Beginning at 8:32, this comment should resonate with many people here.
NYCPSP, go to 14:23.
And this is why we need a renewed focus on sequenced content – civics, history science etc. in school – a base of content that every student should be taught.
Teaching skills and strategies that can be applied to a variety of topics is important. But there also needs to be a strong scope and sequence for basic social studies and science content knowledge.
Gates paid for a study by Georgetown Catholic University in 2020.
The study found that the religious, the poor and, STEM students were more inclined toward authoritarianism. (Koch’s Ilya Shapiro was hired for a top position at Georgetown Law in 2022.)
The method forward…
It’s not a coincidence that Gates said in an interview that he participates in the Catholic church that his wife (now, ex) attended.
The state Catholic Conferences (almost one in every state created specifically to further the Bishops’ agenda) are prominent in the campaigns for school privatization.
Raw Story (6-26-2022) reported about a finding of the National Catholic Reporter (centrist), the major anti-abortion groups were funding voter suppression. The article title, “America’s Catholic Bishops…”
This story has no connection to the Catholic Church. These religious schools are not Catholic.
I understand that you have a specific fixation on the Catholic Church because it is woven into most of your replies – but this is not connected.
Civics and history, were they part of Gates’ Common Core?
What does civics instruction in religious schools look like? Answer, some begin the day by reciting an altered U.S. pledge of allegiance that includes the sect’s religious doctrine. And, of course, there’s the Knights of Columbus influence in getting “under God” added to the pledge after Jefferson warned, in every country, in every age, the priest aligns with the despot. Koch is a despot with very close ties to D.C. located Catholic University of America and his AFP co-hosted school choice rallies with state Catholic Conferences..
William Barr said religion should be introduced at every opportunity. Leonard Leo filled the Courts with conservatives. Both men received awards from Catholic organizations.
We kept are heads in the sand. The leaders of modern nations responded to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. has gone backward in its denial of women’s rights. That denial is 100% at the instigation of conservative religion.
My response went to moderation. When it gets out, read the following.
Pat Cipollone who steered Trump’s agenda including the appointment of federal judges (in Ohio, two of Trump’s judges overturned the Ohio Supreme Court’s attempt to get maps that weren’t gerrymandered) and Nick Sandmann who hired Lin Wood as an attorney, are graduates of Covington Catholic. The NYT reported about the altered pledge at the school.
Beachteach-
The writers discussing the ramifications of the SCOTUS decision are mistaken, the case is limited to the two Maine schools?
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the Dobbs case orders Maine to fund the two born-again evangelical schools the same amount that they pay for private school in jurisdictions where there are no public schools. The broader principle would apply to other states: any state that funds private schools would have to fund religious schools only. However, I have no doubt that the ultimate goal of this Court is to support the DeVos vision of full public support for any kind of school: private, religious, homeschool, public school, for-profit school.
Linda– Such a study strikes me as shallow/ broad-brush and easily debunkable. Let’s take STEM folks: Einstein vs Bill Gates. The religious: Pope Francis vs Justice Alito. Where to even start with “the poor,” as they are such a large proportion of any population, containing everyone from the downtrodden who beat their kids to those who become leaders of social movements.
be three
The study’s reasoning about “the poor’s” inclination toward authoritarianism cited their dissatisfaction with democracy’s failure to advance them economically. Putin tapped into it in Russia. Trump captured that sentiment when he said, “What have you got to lose?”
Bill Gates lives in the state with the most regressive tax system in the U.S.
You can call the study broad brush, I view it as a strategic plan for wealthy libertarians..
It is pointless to argue with religious beliefs. They don’t have to be scientific or even rational. All we can do is recognize they are religious beliefs. We can recognize them as such on account of their wide variety — a few beliefs are nearly universal, but the gods and the devils are in the details and the details vary a lot. Maybe some people lack experience with other forms of religious belief, but these days I see mostly a stubborn lack of respect.
And that is precisely what the Establishment Clause is all about. A government of, by, and for All the People simply cannot muck about in religion without making a mess of itself and its People. Our Framers knew this, our present Supreme Court has forgotten it. There will be hell to pay.
It’s actually worse than pointless to argue with religious beliefs because it lends them credibility that they don’t deserve and worst of all provides a platform for “debate”.
Its like debating vaccines with someone who knows no science. If the person is good at debating (and lying) they can easily convince the uninitiated of blatant falsehoods.
The belief that “We are God’s chosen people” (” Holier than thou”, etc) — and therefore, that “You are not” — to which many religions subscribe makes it very difficult for them to respect the religious beliefs of others.
And in many cases throughout history even to tolerate their existence.
I have always found it curious that so many religious groups claim to be “God’s chosen People”.
Apparently, God was not very selective and gave trophies to everyone for participation.
Follow me and you will have eternal life. Follow her and you will burn in Hell. Which is going to be? Me,? or the witch?
SDP– you stubbornly keep arguing from the atheist POV— the lack of ‘rationality’ of religion. Let it go. No reasonable people are arguing that people should not be allowed to follow their own spiritual/ ethical/ moral angels whatever they may be—until their fist meets your nose. The wisdom of the Founders was in recognizing that entanglement of the State with Religion leads only to division [and, in their experience, violence and war], which undermines democracy establishing a public commons in which all can thrive. The atrociousness of SCOTUS over the last couple of decades is their steady chipping away at that wise premise. Our reckless justices of recent decades have even pronounced the Lemon test as “bad law”—at least it tried to measure when proposed legislation overly entangled the state with religion.
Yes or no?
Do believe it is rational for multiple religions to effectively claim “we are God’s chosen people”?
Yes or no?
Do you believe that the latter has been the source of much bigotry and intolerance, many wars and much human suffering throughout history?
Personally, I have no Dog in this hunt (nor No God, for that matter. Ie, whether I am atheist, Buddhist, Jewish , Catholic or Hindu is irrelevant)
All I have done is highlight what should be obvious facts.
Some may find them uncomfortable, but that doesn’t change the reality.
And incidentally, I was responding directly to Jon’s comment
It is pointless to argue with religious beliefs. They don’t have to be scientific or even rational”
But Jon didn’t give any examples, so I thought I might help by providing one.
I think examples are always helpful.
Jon,
They didn’t “forget”. Interesting article at Raw Story (6-26-2022), “America’s Catholic Bishops…” – it’s about the link between anti-abortion groups and voter suppression funding.
Your first observation is another example of the tragedy of our times. Never have we been better equipped to discuss religion and its many roles in society as now. Americans today have a better understanding of the variety of religious and non-religious belief than any previous generation. We out to be able to discuss it. Yet instead, in this nation all sorts of fundamentalist ideologies thrive. Religion was the most interesting part of my Catholic education. I never took a mandated religion course that was about Catholicism and they let me. When I was teacher in the 80s, I used to joke with my students, “If you don’t talk religion and politics at the dinner table, what the hell do you talk about?”
Over the weekend, I talked with a 13-year-old student who attends a Catholic school. He had watched Fiddler on the Roof in a class during the school year. He came away with the understanding that the story was about an Irish family.
Aye, Lassie. That’s how we talk and sing in an Irish shtetl. How do you think corned beef got into delis? Great with a kosher stout!
Greg, could you approximate the time of the ethnic food fusion for me so that I can place it in the context of other historical events? Has their music been fused too?
Btw- I like your accent.
Not sure of the date of the culinary fusion, but here’s an example of Celtic Klezmer.
GregB– haha, you are reminding me of the 3 yrs I spent in the Midwest. OK, that was in the 1970s, perhaps things have changed? [News/ stats suggests they haven’t.] I quickly learned that discussions about religion or politics were, well… rude! The concept seemed to be: this will immediately engender strong feelings which cannot possibly be resolved by discussion, and may lead to a fistfight. In other words: rational discussion on these subjects is impossible—no one wants to learn anything or expand their consciousness. Please stick to bland subjects. Be nice!
I felt like a fish out of water. Literally. I needed to get back to somewhere closer to an ocean, to give me perspective. That Midwest experience was the opposite of my entire upbringing in upstate-NY. Which was in fact 250 mis from an ocean. But apparently, there’s some kind of ‘tilt’ factor there. Maybe 500+ miles…
My favorite rock song these days is by a Chicago group called Into It. Over It. They have a song that fits what you describe perfectly called Courtesy Greetings. The chorus hits the nail on the head:
We’re falling apart
But insisting that everything’s fine
Sharing courtesy greetings
Confirming we’re nice but not kind
Greg-
In the darkest hour, you provide amusement. (I was looking forward to it.) As I listened to (and, laughed at) the link, I mused what lunatic thought brought about that performance?
Similar to those musicians, I’ve put myself in cringe-worthy situations. Note to self- hope is no excuse for wild abandonment of reason.
Btw- I liked your comment about Feinstein- “no there, there.”
“making a mess of itself.” Boy, is that a true statement.
It is very plausible that this decision has no other motivation than the disruption of the public schools themselves. After all, requiring one religious person to pay for the religious indoctrination of a child to a different religion is most surely a violation of the first Amendment. So why did Roberts and the Playboys decide to record this 45 (pun alert)?
The only reason I can discover is that they want your taxes to go to parochial and evangelical schools rather than public schools. And why would they not? After all, their little garage band was all their kind of folks.
This court is willing to tear up the constitution in order to revive the religious state. But it goes much further than pushing the US back to the days when Protestant domination of some schools taught specific religious doctrine. It goes back to the European model whereby money collected from taxes on salt, bread, and fish went to support an established church.
The rebellion against this has left Europe a secular geographical nature, where “Father MacKenzie picks up the rice at the wedding where no one has been“
They want fundie madrasas in which to indoctrinate a new generation of conservative youth in hopes that via that means, and via voting restrictions, they can turn a tide that is against them.
Bob and Roy- you’re right and they’ve done it with little fanfare.
The PR machine for the real power behind conservative religion is very sophisticated. It’s well-funded and the positions of influence are well-placed.
Papist Bull—-t. n. phrase. A decree of the Extreme Court, formerly the Supreme Court of the United States, on analogy with the Papal Bull. See, for example, Pope Innocent IV’s Ad extirpanda (A.D. 1252), authorizing torture, or Alexander VI’s Inter caetera (A.D. 1493), authorizing the theft of lands by Christians from indigenous peoples. Our new Extreme Court thus upholds these honored traditions.
Thanks to this court, you get to pay to have children indoctrinated in someone else’s primitive religious superstition and bigotry. Democracy, new American fascist style.
That may well be, but my primitive religious superstition and bigotry is superior to your primitive religious superstition and bigotry by a long shot.
Do you dare question Enlightened Master Bob?!?!?!?!!!!
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. –Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
May I add, the deliberate mislabeling of accurate info about the religious tribe, portraying the info falsely as an attack with the purpose that the tribe react in blind loyalty.
The ideal subject(s) of totalitarian rule are many more of my neighbors than I could ever have imagined in my worst nightmares 10 years ago. And I live in a relatively “progressive” area.
yes
I would have labeled my area conservative until I recognized the shift to right wing whackos. They present as normal, have jobs, assets
unlike the Idaho U-Haul brigade. Fox agitated my neighborhood’s conservatives into a state of fear which they embrace for both their life’s noble purpose and entertainment.
With relish, they express a preference for military tribunals.
Yes, very good cite, Bob. My current read is Moíses Naím’s “The Revenge of Power.” [I’m reading it as “La Revancha de los Poderosos” to keep my Spanish honed.] It’s his sequel (after 10 years) to “The End of Power.” Nothing that you haven’t already thought of, but I like his take on post-1989 autocratic MO: the 21stC version, where autocracy disguises itself as democracy, while hollowing out democracy from within.
Thanks for the suggestion, Ginny! I will check this out!
Ordering a copy of this, Ginny!
I appreciate Erika Franz’s description, cited in its intro, that modern autocracy, like the babies of a parasitic wasp, eats democracy from within. I’ve long said that Trump has the morals of parasitic wasp larvae.
The anti-catholic know-nothings ran their roots into an English society of roundheads in the 1600s who read stories of catholic atrocities during the Thirty years war. The persistence of distrust between a Protestant majority and Catholic minority led to the first laws regarding religious toleration in Maryland, a colony with many Catholics justifiably afraid of their religious skins. From that colonial tradition cane laws and ideas against the establishment of state religion.
The Protestant reaction was largely based on stories that were told of various persecution, few of which were actually true, but all of which were plausible within the framework of a Europe that had seen this for centuries.
It is ironic that we now have a catholic majority on the Supreme Court undermining that ideal. It doubles the irony that it is supported by the myth of discrimination against Christianity.
Roy, this reminds me of my dad. He was born in 1924 & raised in a small Indiana farm town near the heart of the KKK re-birth, in a culture that hated both blacks and Catholics.
He was alienated from it early on: used to tell me farm kids had so little to do at night that they drove thro cornfields in their jalopies looking for blacks to chase and scare. So he had innate skepticism of the illustrated pamphlets regularly handed out depicting priests as sinister sexual seducers. Yet as far as I know his family rarely attended church; the anti-Catholicism was strictly a cultural phenomenon. He saw it all as insulated ignorance, & left for Gary steel mills upon graduating 8th-grade, then Navy at 17, & headed East after war with a Navy buddy; married a college graduate.
Our family was mixed Cath/Prot due to his wife’s stepfather & we attended either or both services at will; some converted, some didn’t. [Fortunately our Catholic gfthr prioritized intellectual independence & never proselytized—was happy to drive my gmthr to & from Presby church after his early mass.] Dad remained skeptical of the Catholic influence for a long time, tho formed close friendships on a personal level with priests & ministers alike.
When govt [& hence press] stay out of this arena, such mixtures & tolerance are free to progress as they will, just as we’ve seen social tolerance grow for racially-mixed and gay culture over the decades. I cannot imagine that the re-stirring of this antique pot by rwbacklash is for any reason other than taking advantage of uncertain economic times in order to gain & hold political power.
be three
The best interest of people is always served by checks and balances on the exercise of power, including that of religion. Silence, lack of vigilance, brought about the SCOTUS Roe ruling. The decision was based on conservative religious disdain for and desire to control women.
I conjure up other things when I think of papist bull.
This is not a legitimate Supreme Court.
As AOC said, one slot was stolen by Mitch McConnell and Trump’s appointees misled/lied to get confirmed.
“Stolen” doesn’t seem to be the right word, something stronger needed. Or perhaps it was so egregious, we need to come up with a new word.
Trumpen by the Court
They’ve Trumpen our rights
And Trumpen our schools
And Trumpen our nights
With Trumpenly rules
They’ve Trumpen our courts
And Trumpen our women
And Trump and his hoards
Should not be forgiven
“Trumpen” perfect.
Trumpen is excellent. Allow me to add Trumpled.
Ha ha ha
The American people have been Trumpled upon
Our nation’s been Trumpled
By orange haired Donald
And toppled and crumpled
By Mitchell McConnell
“Can I Trumple you for a dime? I need to call my lawyer” — Donald Trump
GregB says ““Stolen” doesn’t seem to be the right word, something stronger needed.”
One slot was hijacked by Mitch McConnell?
There’s only one word strong enough to describe Mitch McConnell. It’s McConnell.
McConnell 1 (verb) to hijack Washington D.C.,, Trumple democracy, steal the U.S. Constitution and Trumple it up into a little ball. 2 (adj) the strongest, most offensive word possible to call someone 3 (noun) a repulsive, lying, cheating, stealing turtle
McCon-all:
To con a large swath of the population into believing you actually care about something other than your own power
The Supreme Court is NOT supreme:
As Thomas Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence, pointed out: “The question whether the [Supreme Court] judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law…there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches.”
The actual minutes of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as recorded by our Father of the Constitution, James Madison, document that when writing Article III, the intent of and the understanding among the delegates was that “the jurisdiction given [to the Supreme Court] was constructively LIMITED TO CASES OF A JUDICIARY NATURE” and did not include issues of constitutionality.
Founding Father Jefferson also pointed out the very real danger to our republic of allowing the Supreme Court the non-constitutional power to decide the constitutionality of laws: “Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so,” Jefferson noted. “They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps…and their power is all the more dangerous because they are in office for life and are not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots” and “Experience has already shown that the impeachment it [our Constitution] has provided is not even a scare-crow…The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
Since the Constitution does NOT give the Supreme Court any authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws, where did the Court seize the authority that it claims to have? Well, the Court GAVE ITSELF that alleged authority in its Marbury v. Madison ruling.
Must be nice to give yourself constitutional authority that the Constitution doesn’t give you.
When the Court gave itself that unconstitutional authority, Jefferson sadly said that it was “the end of our democracy.”
He was right, as is clear today.
So the time has now come for We the People to either accept that our democracy is ended by a despotic Supreme Court, or to put the Supreme Court back into its constitutional place of deciding only judiciary cases.
“The question whether the [Supreme Court] judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law…there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches.”
I just said the same thing here on this blog.
Good to know I am not the only one who believes that is very dangerous.
quikwrit, do you seriously think it’s a good idea to have the executive or legislative branches decide whether laws or conduct is constitutional?
“are” constitutional — forgive the illiteracy
Read what Jefferson said.
He thought it better to let Congress decide constitutionality than the Supreme Court.
And he was pretty certain that vesting that power in the supreme court was a very bad idea.
But maybe you know more about it than Jefferson.😀
https://famguardian.org/Subjects/Politics/ThomasJefferson/jeff1030.htm
I haven’t seen any actual argument from you as to why letting Congress decide would not work and/or be a bad idea, only an implication that it wouldn’t.
So. What is your argument?
I like a good argument from authority as much as the next fellow, but I’ll go ahead and be so immodest as to say that I do think I’m correct on this and that Jefferson was wrong. I will also say that I don’t know how Jefferson proposed (assuming he ever did make any specific proposal) that Congress would go about the job of deciding whether its own laws are lawful, so it’s possible I’m overlooking the merits of his position. I’ll look at this link and see if there are any specifics there that make me reconsider.
Do you deny that there is a problem with the Supreme Court?
If you admit there is a problem, how would you propose fixing it (other than waiting around until justices retire, that is,)
I appreciate the very detailed response showing the folly of consensus voting, by the way. I found that very convincing.
I thought I laid out that argument in the other thread, SDP. It is simply that a body that enacts laws is not a good neutral arbiter of whether the laws it enacts are permissible. Just as the Executive branch is not a good neutral arbiter of whether actions by the Executive are permissible.
There are downsides to my position (which is the current state of affairs), but I think my position is better than Jefferson’s.
You didn’t actually provide any argument either for the supreme Court or against Congress making the decisions.
You just said you don’t see how that would work.
That’s not an argument.
Most of the laws that are ruled upon by the Supreme court are actually state laws.
Probably just taking that power away would knock their hubris down a few notches.
“If you admit there is a problem, how would you propose fixing it (other than waiting around until justices retire, that is,)”
That’s a tough question and anything I say here is going to be half-baked at most. If I were in a “sandbox” where I could act like God and change things by my own fiat and see how things went, I would revise the Constitution to make the House of Representatives the upper house of Congress. I might even trash the whole thing and choose a parliamentary system like Canada has. Then I’d see how that played out and maybe make some tweaks.
But if we’re talking about ideas that are remotely achievable, I would say that increasing the size of the court is an idea worth trying. It would make the court less dependent on the ideology of five people. It would lower the political stakes of each new SCOTUS appointment, too, and probably make the court less prone to volatile swings. This isn’t achievable right now, given the Sinema/Manchin problem, but unlike revising the Constitution, it’s not inconceivable that it could be achievable in the near future.
We could let the Supreme Court rule over the Constitutionality of only Federal laws.
That way they would not ever get involved with stuff like Roe vWade and school funding and NY gun laws. Which seem to be the things they have the biggest problem remaining impartial over.
I also thought most of what Robert Hubbell proposed in the article Diane posted makes sense.
I’m also remembering now that some have proposed the creation of specialized courts that would have sole jurisdiction over certain issues like health care. (Although those courts probably would quickly become just as politicized as the Supreme Court.)
Term limits and age limits on the Supreme Court are also worth considering.
There is no silver bullet or easy solution because the problem is structural and has been baked in for so long.
I don’t see how simply increasing the size is going to fix the central problem of judges with too much power.
Whether the number is 9, 13 or 17, the Supreme Court should not be able to turn the lives of hundreds of millions of people upside down in one fell swoop the way they just did, especially when they quite clearly aren’t even basing their decisions on the Constitution.
It’s not clear why you think revising the Constitution is necessary.
After all, the Constitution does not say anywhere that the Supreme court even HAS the power of judicial review.
Would it be better if a margin of three Senators decided such questions for 350 million Americans?
I don’t see a way out of the problem of a small group of elites deciding questions that affect everybody. One way out of the problem is the approach taken by the Alito wing in Dobbs: decide the Supreme Court has no business deciding whether a state law is unconstitutional, and let the voters of that state decide through the political process. That’s a populist approach but it’s not one that most abortion rights supporters like.
Revising the Constitution may or may not be necessary to strip the Court of its power to exercise judicial review. I think stripping that power would be a bad idea for the reasons I’ve stated. But let’s say for a moment that we want to strip that power from the Court. How would that happen? Someone needs to do something to force a change in centuries of court practice. An act of Congress that says that SCOTUS lacks that power? That would be interesting to watch, for sure.
Impeaching people who “misled” Senators during confirmations might also be a good first step.
I will catch hell here for this but I don’t buy the idea that there’s anything impeachable about anything any of the justices said at their confirmation hearings.
But yes, impeachment is a thing that could be done. Presumably ManSinema would not go along, though.
Any proposal of Alito should be a nonstarter.
That fellow has zero credibility at this point.
Collins and Manchin both say Mr k misled them, but I know that if it came to a vote, even they probably wouldn’t vote to impeach. And there is not a chance in hell that there would be enough votes, at any rate.
But as far as I can see, any proposal that deals with individual justices misses the central issue of too much power in the hands of just a few people who are basically answerable to no one.
But honestly. I’m not under the illusion that anything will change because the Senate is all but completely dysfunctional.
So we have a dysfunctional Senate, a rogue Supreme Court and a Fascist former president waiting in the wings.
What’s not to be optimistic about?
“I also thought most of what Robert Hubbell proposed in the article Diane posted makes sense.”
I’ve read it five times and I can’t see one thing he “proposes.” He states a lot of problems, lists the predictable bromides of what “must” be done, and then proceeds not to give one example of how to do it. Again, what did he propose in that rehashing of obviousness?
I suppose I was referring to what you call “the list of predictable bromides of what must be done.” I thought most of the list of what must be done made sense.
FLERP, I agree with you there’s nothing impeachable about what any nominee for SCOTUS said in their hearings. These guys/ gals aren’t lawyers for nothing. They word their responses to Senate questions carefully. I expect Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett all have at hand weaselly-worded but legally-correct explanations for how declaring Roe/ Casey as “settled law,” yet choosing the MS case to send Roe/Casey back to the states is not “lying under oath.” It’s all Kabuki theater. Senate knew goddam well these folks were carefully chosen for their determination to overturn Roe/ Casey at the first opportunity, and they confirmed them expecting that result in order to please their needed margin of extreme rw voters &/or to avoid being primaried by a candidate even further to the right. The rest is play-acting. [Susan Collins gets the Oscar for Kabuki performance, with her claims to having held Kavanaugh feet to fire in a 2-hr interrogation on the issue.]
Basically, because there is no mention of judicial review in the Constitution, what it boils down to is that NO Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of a law is actually based in the Constitution.
That means much (if not most) of what the Supreme Court does and has done for the past 200 years has no legitimacy. (Just because John Marshall claimed the court had a power in 1803 hardly makes it so)
Personally, I’d be embarrassed to work at a job (Supreme Court Justice) that I knew was based on a such a fraud.
But of course, the current majority obviously have no shame anyway because they don’t even base their decisions on the Constitution.
The whole thing is pathetic.
I don’t know. Article 3 says that “[t]he judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made . . . .” So the Constitution expressly gives the Supreme Court the jurisdiction to resolve disputes that “arise under the Constitution.” A litigant can file an action alleging that some conduct by the government violates the Fourth Amendment. The Court has the authority to hear and resolve that dispute, which necessarily requires the Court to determine whether the government conduct is “unconstitutional.” That authority comes expressly from Article 3, doesn’t it?
A Supreme Court that derives it’s power from “I don’t know”
Ha ha ha
Its interesting that John Marshall and you are reading into the Constitution a power that is not explicitly there and then assuming that that power can be used to weigh in on the Constitutionality not only of state laws but of the powers of the other branches of government.
Talk about picking yourself up by your own bootstraps.
This is why I could never be a lawyer. Far too much handwaving.
Of Cornbread and Laws
Nature’s laws
Are set in stone
Legal laws
Are set in pone
It just seems obvious to me. Agree to disagree!
What j”ust seems obvious” to one person can be clear as mud to another, and not simply because of ignorance because it clearly did not “just seem obvious to Jefferson (sorry for the appeal to authority, but Jefferson was clearly no ignorant slouch)
it just seems obvious ” is not the way to deal with important matters.
What I would call for at a bare minimum is a debate in Congress about the issue.
That’s the way it would have been settled back in the days of the Constitutional convention.
And from reading what Jefferson has said, it seems that is also what he would have supported. His primary issue was the way that Marshall unilaterally took on (usurped?) the power.
What j”ust seems obvious” to one person can be clear as mud to another, and not simply because of ignorance because it clearly did not “just seem obvious to Jefferson (sorry for the appeal to authority, but Jefferson was clearly no ignorant slouch)
it just seems obvious ” is not the way to deal with important matters.
Or maybe debates in all state legislatures and another Constitutional convention, since Congress these days can’t decide anything of importance.
But I am not actually delusional enough to think that any of this will ever happen.
So happy bootstrapping!
Which I suppose means they could also not decide on Constitutionality questions.
We are doomed pretty much any way one looks at it.
SDP, my last argument was that the Constitution does expressly give the Supreme Court the power of judicial review of laws because it expressly grants jurisdiction to resolve disputes that “arise under the Constitution,” and resolving disputes that arise under the Constitution necessarily involves determining whether laws or conduct conflict with the Constitution.
This has been a fun discussion, so thanks for that. But as a practical matter, there is no chance that the Supreme Court is going to be stripped of judicial review.
quickwrit– How sad. It seems that Jefferson spotted the problem, and Marbury v Madison confirmed his fears, yet he had no real solution. I agree with FLERP that allowing legislators themselves to determine whether the laws they write are in accordance with the Constitution is a conflict of interest, & provides no check/ balance. It appears then, that SCOTUS built for itself an authentic role as check/ balance through adopted norms (perhaps much of it based on stare decisis) that basically did the job, but [like so many developments] were not recorded precisely in the written Constitution. Perhaps it was not predictable, but that left SCOTUS vulnerable to what has been a nearly-30-yr wave of knocking down govtl norms, leaving us with only the bare bones of originally-written law. Once you cast aside the norms of Constitutional interpretation and substitute some rogue method—binary, or ‘originalist’ or whatever– you destroy the tradition.
There is something deeply wrong about this. The Torah has the Talmud. Written English law has the common law. I’ll wager every legal tradition on earth has its norms for interpretating centuries-old written law that each society builds up in layers on the base law over centuries: it is the way one adapts traditional law to function in the context of new social/ tech/ et al devpts.
OK, now I’m getting hot under the collar. What I describe 2 paras up is no fault of the Constitution as written. It is a rogue process that is designed to break with ordinary legal process as established over centuries in civilized nations. It is an MO recognized from any autocracy you can name: it’s called “getting control of the courts.” One of the very first goals of any would-be autocracy. It’s how you promulgate what Moíses Naím in “The Revenge of Power” [2022] calls seudoley , pseudo-law: looks/ smells/ sounds like democratically-promulgated law but isn’t—it’s law created by those wielding oligarchical [or military, or royalist, or other totalitarian] power over the people.
Most of the laws that the Supreme court weighs in on are actually state laws, so it would not simply involve legislators from a single state making the decision of constitutionality.
And the idea that the Supreme Court is a neutral/unbiased arbiter (or even less biased than the entire Congress would be) somehow above the fray is just laughable.
One need look no further than decisions like Dred Scott and Plessy to see that.
Our country might have survived for 200 years with the sometimes grossly biased decisions of the Court, but I’d have to say “just barely, by the skin of our teeth, only after a bloody civil war”.
And recent decisions by the court make it doubtful that we will survive much longer.
Finally, what Jefferson was MOST concerned about was the fact that John Marshall had given himself and the Court and exclusive right not only to be the final and unchallengeable arbiter of the Constitutionality of state laws but to also be the arbiter of the powers of the other two branches of government. That effectively sets up the potential that just a few individuals can control the whole government if they desire.
And not incidentally, a few individuals on the Court did just that by stopping the legal recount in Florida and effectively installing Bush as President, with everything that followed from that decision (war on Iraq, rise of Trump, etc etc)
Bringing back the good old days of Dred Scott and Plessy when the Supremes were a neutral arbiter s not going to fix the central problem that they just have too much damned power.
The two Maine schools that may now receive public funding are openly discriminatory”
Or, what are commonly known as fake Christians.
A bunch of lying, cheating politicians think they have moral high ground.
Have you read that the 2 Christian schools in fact refuse to accept public funds? That’s because ME, having anticipated this SCOTUS decision, already amended its anti-discrimination law last year to apply to any private school accepting private funds, whether sectarian or not.
Whether they will or will not accept funds is irrelevant to the fact that by their gross discrimination, they are behaving in a profoundly UN Christian manner.
Which is why I called them Fake Christians.
The disriminatory schools won’t get a dime of the tuition money they spent so many years fighting for because state law forbids it.
Fitting
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2022/06/25/news/religious-schools-next-hurdles/
I was just logging on to post a similar article from a different Maine Newspaper. There was a lot of coverage on this today. Maine takeaway:
“Attorney General Aaron Frey said both Christian schools involved in the lawsuit have policies that discriminate against students and staff on a basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, preventing their participation in the tuition program despite the hard-fought litigation.
“The education provided by the schools at issue here is inimical to a public education. They promote a single religion to the exclusion of all others, refuse to admit gay and transgender children, and openly discriminate in hiring teachers and staff,” he said in a statement.
“…….all schools receiving state tuition must abide by the Maine Human Right Act, which bans discriminating against someone because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability, Frey said.”
SDP– Like I said above, last year ME [anticipating this SCOTUS decision] amended its anti-discrimination law to apply to any private school getting public funds, regardless of religious affiliation.
I would love to see another appeal of this case. SCOTUS would no longer have a platform to claim discrimination against religious schools—all private schools are treated the same by the state. They’d have to actually claim that ME’s civil-rights law against publicly-funded schools discriminating against sexual orientation/ identity is somehow specifically targeted against a few religious schools—schools which might otherwise have enjoyed the “religious freedom” to profit from public funds while discriminating against gays, trans teachers/ students/ parents.
Maine is an anomalous state- “7 states where demographics haven’t determined their political destiny–yet” (Governing, 8-10-2019)
Based on combined factors- race, educational attainment and population density-Maine would be solidly in the GOP camp. It isn’t because one of the lowest rates of religious observance repositions it more Democratic than expected.
Alito bit here, Alito bit there.
Trumple it under foot.
Steal it away,
a bit each day.
Soon democracy is kaput.
Soon democracy is Kavanin
exactly. well said
Just Alito bit
Just Alito bit
Just Alito bit of legal muck
The article didn’t mention this specifically, but how exactly does the Carson v Makin decision affect charter schools? I’m sure I’ve read here that in theory, the decision makes charter schools voucher schools. But I’m not sure why we said that. For one thing, I assume this would vary according to a state’s charter law. Some [many?] state charter laws require that charter schools— because they are public schools—follow state standards and testing reqts, & probably enumerate other reqts that pertain as well. In other words, the ‘flexibility’ encouraging ‘innovation’ only goes so far, as enumerated, if you want to get pubsch tax revenue.
I found this in a 2010 article announcing an AME Zion church’s application for a charter: “New Jersey is explicit in its regulations on charter schools. They cannot be operated by religious organizations, nor are they permitted to include religious instruction in the curriculum, the same as traditional public schools. ‘Charters have been housed in church facilities, churches have raised funds to help charters and church members have volunteered their time,’ said Alan Guenther, spokesman for the state Department of Education. ‘But they remain public schools, governed by the same laws and regulations.’”
And what about a couple of state courts that have ruled that charters are not in fact public schools, at least for the purposes pertinent to those cases?
Can SCOTUS can stick its nose into the running of charter schools—if they are public schools?
The assault on our democracy undertaken by radical right wingers is breath taking. Their flanking maneuvers come from fundamentalist Christo Nationalists, Libertarian corporatists intent to clog regulatory powers of government in the hopes of bringing down what they call the “administrative state, the big lie, and culture warfare against anyone or anything that challenges their dark world view. Democrats have offered little resistance and have actually encouraged right wing malfeasance through acting to quell progressives. There will be over reach brought on by the hubris of such political success, there always is, and the infighting will be fierce once these radicals turn on one another but rectifying the damage done will take decades. I feel like I am living through STAR WARS in real time….