REFLECTIONS/Jonathan Gramling
Might Doesn’t Make Right
The last 15 years have just been amazing. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, it sent shock waves through the Republican Party and conservative America all the way to the far right and white supremacist worlds. They were at a cross roads. They had a choice to make. Does the Republican Party examine itself and find policies to push that would be attractive to Latino, African American and other voters of color? Or does it circle the wagons and defend “White America” against all other groups through rigging the branches of government, state and federal, in a way that would keep them in power as a minority government?
As it now has come clear, the Republican Party chose the latter course of action and proceeded to appoint people to courts with the right ideology versus competency. Federal Judge Aileen Cannon is the epitome of this type of judge. Does everyone remember her ridiculous finding last year that gave Trump special status (read unconstitutional) in her ruling about Trump wanting to preempt the Department of Justice’s investigation of his possible obstruction of the FBI trying to retrieve federal documents at Mar-a-Lago?
And who can ever forget then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented denial of a Senate hearing on President Obama’s choice for the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrick Garland saying it was too close to the election. In essence, he saved that choice for Trump. And of course, McConnell broke his newly created precedence four years later when he rushed through Judge Amy Coney Barret’s nomination with less than a month to go before the 2020 election. She was young and ideological. Experience had nothing to do with it.
And of course Trump’s three conservative Supreme Court picks gave the conservatives a strong majority on the court and quickly threw out 50 years of precedence in ruling Roe v. Wade, which enshrined a woman’s right to choose, null and void, basically saying it wasn’t protected by the Constitution because it isn’t specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
I am waiting for this “strict constructionist” court to overturn the Supreme Court rulings that made corporations people — it is nowhere stated — so that their dark money contributions to state and federal elections can be banned.
I am also waiting for this Supreme Court to overturn the Supreme Court rulings that prohibit the regulation of guns like AR-15s. Using the “strict constructionist” philosophy, AR-15s and other automatic and semi-automatic guns didn’t exist when the Constitution was passed. And so they aren’t the guns that the Framers had in mind when they passed the Constitution way back in 1787. I doubt that they will.
And then there was propagandist Fox News spewing out lies about the 2020 election in order to preserve their audience share and corporate profits. The people who were telling the lies knew that they were telling lies. And they did it anyway because of the money.
Fox News had the audacity to claim that they were journalists protected by the First Amendment. I found that to be a lie onto itself and an insult to all the journalists around the world who actually believe that journalism has something to do with truth-telling and holding governmental leaders accountable and not promoter their delusions like Fox did for Trump.
But low and behold, it took the rulings of a little Delaware state court to ensure that the truth be told in court. In ruling after ruling, the judge made it clear that the cockamamie conspiracy theories that Dominion Voting Systems was owned by Venezuelans and electronically flipped the vote to Joe Biden on a national level were lies and not something that would be left to a jury to decide. In other words, Fox News wasn’t going to be able to BS its way out of the lawsuit. It’s no surprise that they settled for $787 million. In my opinion, they got off cheap.
Fox used the First Amendment as a bargaining chip. And while they settled this time, more trouble is around the bend. To be continued.