GOP Plot to Remove Elected Judiciary and Will US Ever Elect a Woman Prez
Alabama Spanked for Defying SCOTUS, Floridians Save Abortion Clinic, Trump's Poison-Pill Endorsement, The Everly Brothers Sing
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
We can have no progress without change, whether it be basketball or anything else. Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
Coach John Wooden
My coach at UCLA and dear friend for 50 years loved to throw out pithy sayings, sometimes his own, sometimes variations of someone else. His goal was to produce great basketball players, sure, but also great men who would apply his principles of teamwork, discipline, morality, and compassion to their lives long after they stopped playing basketball. He wanted us to reach our full potential—on and off the court.
National GOP Plot to Control Judiciary by Removing Elected Justices
Why This Is One of the Most Important News Stories Yet
It’s not news that the Republican Party has been on an ethical downward spiral for years. This is not an accusation against rank-and-file members of the party or even several notable Republicans who have shown integrity in the face of their party’s moral decline. In general, the GOP has supported a rapist (“Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll”) and insurrectionist (“Watchdog group sues to remove ‘insurrectionist’ Trump from 2024 ballot”) for president. They have encouraged deep national distrust of our electoral system—just because they lost. They have also worked hard to suppress voters of color, the elderly, and students who might disagree with them. They have severely restricted abortion, reducing women to second-class citizens. They have banned books and gutted education in order to denigrate Black history and further marginalize LGBTQ+.
I often wonder how they justify these insidious actions that are clearly detrimental to democracy and still think of themselves as patriotic Americans. They are like abusive parents who believe beating their children is for their own good. Every bruise is a badge of good parenting. And, man, they are bruising this country.
Now they are trying to scorch-earth the American judicial system. Elected district attorneys are being suspended or fired for not falling in line with anti-woke agendas (“Florida Gov. DeSantis suspends another Democratic prosecutor as he seeks GOP presidential nomination”). The removal of elected officials of a rival political party is the definition of totalitarianism. But they are not done. They have begun a full assault on state supreme courts in an effort to undermine free elections and democracy. This tactic is so blatantly undemocratic, so openly traitorous that it’s shocking Republicans and Democrats alike are not marching on every one of these state capitals demanding the protection of democracy.
Let’s take a look at their destructive handiwork:
State Republicans Try to Remove Top Jurist for Mentioning the Existence of Racial Bias (Slate)
SUMMARY: On Tuesday, it was reported that North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls could be ousted from her seat for judicial ethics violations. Did she fail to disclose gifts from a billionaire benefactor on whose cases she was ruling? No. Maybe she’d gone on luxury vacations across the globe paid for by some of the richest men in the country and neglected to mention them on disclosure forms? Nope. Perhaps one of these billionaires bought her mom a house? Not that either. Her true crime: Earls, the only Black woman on North Carolina’s high court, spoke out about racial bias in her courtroom. Her alleged misconduct was speaking to the media about how few clerks of color the court employed and how her colleagues treated certain attorneys, including a Black woman, who argued before them. For that, a Republican-stacked judicial “ethics” commission has gone after her. Its targeting of Earls could fulfill the wishes of the gerrymandered Republican Legislature by removing a tireless advocate of racial equality.
Earls, who was elected with 1.8 million votes in 2018 and is a frequent dissenter to the right-wing majority’s decisions, was responding to a study of advocates who argued at the high court. This study found that 90 percent of the lawyers were white and nearly 70 percent were male. Asked for her response, Earls noted the lack of racial diversity among the court’s clerks and her colleagues’ disparate treatment of certain advocates at oral argument. She went out of her way to say she didn’t think that this was the result of conscious bias, but “we all have implicit biases.” Earls also criticized decisions by Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, to end implicit bias training and disband commissions looking into racial justice issues.
MY TAKE: This Republican response is part of their larger, national campaign to pretend systemic racism doesn’t exist, despite the numerous studies that have proven otherwise (“Studies find evidence of systemic racial discrimination across multiple domains in the United States”). Red states are sanitizing history, as Florida recently did by touting the benefits of slavery for slaves. Or Oklahoma’s top education official declaring that the Tulsa Massacre in which White vigilantes killed hundreds of Black residents had nothing to do with racism. The goal is to rewrite history to its pre-sixties standards when “good Negroes” knew their place, which was at the back of the room, smiling in gratitude for the generosity of Whites.
Do you think it’s relevant that Justice Earls is the only Black woman on the court? Or that Monique Worrell, the state attorney DeSantis suspended, was the only Black woman state attorney? (FYI: Worrell is suing DeSantis because of her removal.) Women and Blacks are the two groups the GOP is targeting the most because they think they’re the most vulnerable, the most unwilling to fight back or to gain enough support to join the fight.
The ethics rule that is being applied by the GOP says that judges should conduct themselves “at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” They argue that without definitive proof of a specific judge, she can’t speak out about racism. However, when a study reveals a problem and a judge acknowledges the problem, that should give the public confidence that the problem is being addressed. If everyone ignores the study, that creates lack of confidence that those in power care. Using this standard, there would be a case for removing judges who didn’t acknowledge the study.
The only way to fix a problem is to admit there is one. But Republicans aren’t interested in fixing a problem that doesn’t personally affect them. They are like alcoholics at a family intervention denying they drink too much. Nor do they want to feel any guilt for a problem that affects others who aren’t part of their social circle. I’m reminded of Phil Ochs’ satiric song “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”:
Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends