A word on the passing of the "Independent Legislature Theory"
It was stupid, but also shamelesss
When the Supreme Court slammed North Carolina on Tuesday with a 6-3 ruling telling the state’s Republican legislature they can’t be all-powerful, it was a win for democracy. Decent America is right to celebrate.
(There is, however, a clause in the decision that leaves the door open for “conservatives” to keep concocting different outrageous “legal theories” that might serve their purposes. I guess the SCOTUS “conservatives” didn’t want to slam the door too hard on their fellow travelers.)
All I want to say about this is that the stupidity of the case is outdone by its shamelessness.
There was a time in this country when most lawyers would have been ashamed to bring a suit claiming that a state legislature was unreviewable by that state’s supreme court. The Framers understood what Montesquieu said about legislatures—that they cannot be the judges of their own edicts because that would make them tyrants. The Republican legislature of North Carolina apparently does not know this or, more likely, doesn’t care because they want to be tyrants.
But to actually file a complaint to the U.S. Supreme Court that their acts are not subject to judicial review is breathtaking chutzpah. “Yes, this is completely contrary to the principles on which the Constitution was built. We don’t care. We demand you make us tyrants!”
I don’t know which is worse, the stupidity of putting forth a nonsense complaint based on twisting two phrases in the Constitution or the shamelessness of going to a court of justice with a blatantly unjust complaint.
The source of this shamelessness in the legal world is, of course, the Federalist Society, which is just a school of sophistry for “conservatives.” They have taught “conservative” lawyers shameless arrogance and disdain for justice.
But the source of the Federalist Society’s shamelessness is “conservatism” itself, which is nothing but an engine of deception and bad will in society.
If you followed my series on the deceptiveness of Russell Kirk’s “principles” of “conservatism,” you know that every “principle” that “conservatives” claim to hold is a sham—a positive disguise for a very negative character trait in the “conservative” soul.
The entire “conservative” persona is nothing but a psychological coping mechanism for people who are desperately afraid of the slightest diminution of their real or imagined privileges. Their “principles” are designed to mask their fears, primarily to themselves but secondarily to others as well, and justify any actions they wish to take to assuage those fears.
If their actions are unjust, deceitful, power-hungry, antisocial, predatory, and even tyrannical—that’s just fine. According to their “principles,” they are on the side of the angels.
In reality, being unjust, deceitful, power-hungry, predatory, and tyrannical puts “conservatives” on the side of the devils, driven entirely by unchecked inner anxieties. Dressing up in religious costumes, patriotic colors, or superhero spandex cannot free them from the fear that gnaws at them, the terror that they might lose something—anything, no matter how small—that palliates their anxiety even a bit.
Decent America is not without blame here. For seventy years, we have done little more than roll out eyes at “conservatism.” We have allowed this cowardly, selfish, profoundly antisocial pathology to pass itself off as a legitimate political world view.
We have tried to contain it around the edges out of a sense of decency. We argue ceaseless and correctly that “conservative” policies will harm people. We try activism to reverse the harm where “conservative” policies have taken hold and refuse to budge.
But merely by engaging with this perverted world view we give it a legitimacy it does not deserve. Sitting down with mass murderers, arguing with them about their priorities, and trying to outmaneuver them or stop them from killing too many people just encourages them.
Is it extreme to compare “conservatives” to mass murderers?
“Conservatives” are killing millions of people all over the globe. Their arrogant defiance of the necessity to curb their lifestyles keeps the world chained to fossil fuels, the burning of which is quickly burning up the planet.
Their ignorant fear of losing a zero-sum economic game keeps disadvantaged people working multiple jobs just to break even (if that is still possible for them), ruining their health and even driving them to drugs and death in a futile effort to alleviate the unrelenting misery of their lives.
Their self-righteous religiosity, which disguises their profound disquiet at not having the slightest clue about the mystery of human birth, has inflicted second-class citizenship on millions of American women, imposing on some them forced births, near-death infections, and, soon enough, death itself.
And now some of them are hell-bent on killing American democracy—the last, best hope of earth—to prop up the orange idol who distills all their fears and spits them out at decent America. If “conservatives” manage to kill American democracy, the death knell for humanity will be only years away
Do they intend all this killing?
What difference does that make? They refuse to control their fears. When told repeatedly that their choices lead to death, they keep making the same choices. Whenever Americans have allowed “conservatives” to gain control of government, everything unravels in very short order and has to be repaired by Democrats.
And the scale of the damage done by “conservatives” keeps increasing. The damage done by Reagan/Bush was great, but Clinton managed to erase it. The damage done by W and Cheney was much greater, but Obama managed to mitigate it. The damage done by Trump was nearly catastrophic, but Biden has so far been able to turn much of it back.
But this cannot continue. At some point, the damage will be too great to recover. It almost happened on January 6.
At some point, decent Americans have to look at such irrational, destructive, and self-destructive behavior and decide it just has to stop. Whatever the level of awareness that “conservatives” have about the consequences of their cowardice, about the effects on the outer world of their inner pusillanimity toward their besetting fears, their refusal to confront their bad character is killing the rest of us.
As I keep saying, decent America has to step up immediately and put an end to the Republican party at the ballot box—before they take that away from us. Whether those of us who see the imminent danger can convince enough basically decent but non-political people that the danger is upon us right now—that is the question on which the future hangs.
So, the banal evil of cowardly “conservatism” has trained Federalist Society legal hack to debase the halls of justice with shameful lawsuits that no decent judge would countenance. Federalist Society judges have been planted throughout the system, precisely to countenance what should never be countenanced. Six of them have been planted on the Supreme Court itself, and three of them could not be shamed into reviving their catatonic consciences by an unconscionable lawsuit, let alone into defending justice against tyrannical claims by a morally degenerate state legislature.
And in a few hours, everyone expects that at least five of those six plants on the Supreme Court will again strip rights from people who trigger their deep, abiding, and unchallenged fears—racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people—while maintaining or restoring unjust privileges for white people and hypocritical, prudish “Christians.”
The longer decent America continues to treat “conservatives” like annoying, selfish, braying asses, the closer we come to Armageddon.
Their evil may be banal and cowardly, but evil it is.
Either we crush it, or it crushes us.
And time is running out.