Supreme Power

Apologists and eternal optimists are looking at the last Supreme Court rulings of the 2013-14 term and trying to mitigate the decisions against reproductive rights (the Hobby Lobby case) and union due collections (the Harris case) and saying, oh, the Hobby Lobby decision doesn't give religiously minded businesspeople the right to deny all forms of contraception coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act, and, oh, the Harris decision doesn't entirely gut the ability of unions to collect dues from partial public employees who declined to join public employee unions, but these decisions can't be read as anything but assaults on workers' privacy and right to organize.  The former decision puts women at the mercy of male employers with a different set of values then their own, while the latter decision makes it more difficult for unions to engage in collective bargaining.  (Both decisions were written by Justice Alito, my old neighbor in West Caldwell, piling more shame onto the New Jersey town that gave the world G. Gordon Liddy.)

Liberals are now screaming over the decisions and what to do about them.  Well, my fellow progs, if you clam down for a moment, I'll tell you exactly what you can do . . .nothing!  The reactionaries on the Supreme Court aren't going anywhere, the midterm elections are too staggered against the Democrats, and there's no executive order that can stop them.  And don't bother with a boycott of Hobby Lobby.  How many progressives shop there, anyway?  

We're just going to have to resign ourselves to the fact that the 2010s, which we once thought would be a great decade for liberals, has become the worst, most reactionary, most repressive decade for this country in recent memory, and the trend is toward a system with a mostly white elite and a majority-Hispanic/non-white permanent underclass.

Thank you for talkin' to me (South) Africa!

And as for the Supreme Court . . . I once thought that it was demeaning to call the Court the "Supremes," which made them sound more like a girl group than a branch of government.  Now I realize this it's appropriate.  They're being supreme without the "court" part.