fuck the supreme court
seriously…. thomas, scalia, alito, roberts, and kennedy can’t retire soon enough. this week, they decided that prisoners have no right to undergo DNA testing that might establish their innocence, even if they pay for it themselves. so what if they might be innocent? they were convicted already, so who needs new evidence, right? no matter that over 200 wrongfully convicted people have been set free thanks to new DNA evidence.
these 5 guys also decided that workers bringing suit against their employers for age discrimination should face a tougher standard of proof before their claims would be recognized as valid. because people who are being discriminated against have it so easy already, obviously.
among the other issues to appear before the court as this session wraps up are affirmative action, school strip searches, regulation of political films, schools’ responsibilities toward disabled students, and… oh yeah, the voting rights act. depending on the whims of anthony kennedy, the so-called “swing” (but still usually voting with the scalia wing) justice, it’s not hard to predict what the court is going to do with these cases.
see, the problem with these guys is not just that their conservative disposition inclines them to view certain claims with skepticism or something like that. it is that their votes and opinions almost ALWAYS, with very little exception, favor the privileged, the corporations, the state, the powerful interests against the weak individual. it goes beyond mere disposition, it is dogma. these guys are actively making our country worse, and there is no real way to stop them, even with a democratic congress. sometimes they can pass a law specifically intended to rectify the damage wrought by the supreme court, such as the lilly ledbetter fair pay act earlier this year. but congress can’t do that for every single case. we just have to wait for them to retire or die off.
