The Supreme Court Is Not Legitimate

I suspect that a great number of Americans feel, as I do, that decisions made by the current Supreme Court are not legitimate due to the way the court was assembled, and that, due to the current makeup of the court, decisions do not represent the last word on constitutional questions, but rather represent temporary politically-motivated choices that in many cases need to be swept away as soon as we get a legitimate court.

A few reasons:

• Before Merrick Garland, we could complain about the members of the court and the bad decisions they sometimes made, but everyone on the court had been put in place through a process that is laid out in the Constitution. But when Merrick Garland was appointed, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans decided that the Senate's duty to confirm justices meant that they could just choose not to confirm or even consider anyone for an indefinite period of time. Forget the nonsense McConnell said about it being the last year of Obama's presidency; the timing was completely arbitrary, made up to fit the situation, and McConnell happily tossed the whole idea aside when he had the chance to confirm Amy Coney Barrett right before an election. The Senate had plenty of time to consider Garland - way more than enough time - and McConnell never explained what was magic about the one-year rule he claimed he was adhering to.

The non-confirmation, non-consideration of Merrick Garland created a constitutional crisis. We no longer have a reliable method of filling Supreme Court vacancies in the United States because of Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate. It only works now if the president and the Senate majority are in the same party. We could go ten years, maybe more, without anyone being confirmed. Certainly Democrats have no reason to ever confirm a Republican president's appointee, because the Republicans stole a seat, and Democrats want it back.

And if you think, well, what McConnell did was fine because the Constitution grants him the power to do what he did, consider what McConnell himself would have said if Democrats had pulled a similar stunt, and you will realize that even Mitch McConnell does not believe it was legitimate, no Republican actually thinks it was legitimate, and no one anywhere thinks it was legitimate. It was all just a convenient bit of hypocrisy.

• The court does not represent the majority of the American people, nor does it reflect the results of our elections. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but six of the nine justices on the court are conservatives, and five of them, enough to swing any court decision, are probably more conservative than at least 90% of Americans. There is a huge disconnect between how the American people have voted and what they got in the Supreme Court. Part of that is the Electoral College, part is bad luck, and part is Mitch McConnell's dishonesty. There may be another part, that Justice Kennedy retired while we had a Republican president, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg stayed on until she died while a Republican was president.

Whatever the reasons, we voted for Democrats for the last 28 years, and we got a Supreme Court that is dominated by extremist Republicans. It is about as far as possible from what we all voted for, and their decisions as a whole reflect that disconnect with America.

• Clarence Thomas should not be on the Supreme Court. Never mind that he almost certainly sexually harassed Anita Hill and lied about it during his confirmation hearings. Set aside that he is a political activist and extremist who is one of the most conservative Supreme Court justices ever, completely out of step with the country.

Clarence Thomas's wife is a far right-wing political activist who was deeply involved in trying to override the 2020 presidential election result and install the loser as the illegitimate president of the United States. It is fair for us to assume that Clarence Thomas knew what she was doing, and that he did nothing to prevent the effort to overturn the Constitution. It is also fair for us to believe that he was on board with the coup attempt. We already know that Thomas not only refused to recuse himself from a case before the court regarding the January 6 congressional committee, he was the only justice to vote to prevent the committee from getting records they were seeking. With his wife involved in the effort to nullify the election, he should have recused himself, and the decision not to was just corrupt.

At this point he should resign. There is no reason for Americans to think he will make decisions honestly and fairly.

We need a new way to  fill the Supreme Court. The current system is broken. The current court is broken.

This week, I made my 10,000 steps every day. On Monday, I hit 1,750,000 steps, one quarter of the way to Miami. Today I made it to Willis Coulee, halfway across Montana, equidistant from Cooper Pass at the Idaho border and Alzada, Montana, a census-designated place (I'm getting used to that term) next to the Wyoming border. Also, I'm now 50,000 steps ahead of my target pace.

I'm happy with my progress.