Trump/Harris Supreme Court Picks and the Long Pattern of Judicial “Extremism’, by Steve Penfield

A closer look at eight pivotal SCOTUS decisions and the havoc those rulings inflicted on America. Will the next President make things better or worse?

With the election deadline looming, millions of Americans already have or soon will cast a ballot to give their consent on which major party candidate will be our next president. Part of that consideration is—or at least should be—what type of judges Team Trump or Team Harris would appoint, particularly to the nation’s top bench.

With nearly 4 years of experience in the Oval Office for each team—Trump beginning in 2017, Harris in 2021—the public has some indication of what sort of judicial philosophy each candidate deems worthy of such honors. Although the troubling economic and pro-military positions of both candidates may be too similar to evoke much excitement, on the important topic of Law and Order, there is quite a gap.

Since actual results are the best indication of true motives, I’ll be focusing primarily on the outcomes of modern legal extravagances. Squabbling over arcane philosophy is best left for legacy media hacks and law school professors who need to sound intelligent while saying nothing. I’ll get to some core theories later, after the evidence has been presented.

For a snapshot on how corrupted our legal profession has become, I’ll begin with an overview of lawlessness imposed by our federal courts, then move on to four examples of legal excesses that would have been corrected decades ago—if we had a competent system of training future lawyers and judges. And already, the extremism of one of our major parties—and the ineptitude of the other party—becomes evident. After that, I’ll move on to Supreme Court decisions over the last 76 years that enabled such an unstable legal foundation in the first place.

Weaponizing the Law: Examples of Lawless Hyper-Legalism

Long before Democrat vigilantes weaponized the justice system against Donald Trump, a coalition of lawyers had perverted justice in a pattern that rewards criminal behavior while punishing productive commerce. This destructive “dual justice” (far beyond racial matters) is now a major problem affecting many elements of society.

The “lawless” side of the ledger is usually more obvious, at least with its end results, since internet news sites are now reporting on matters that legacy media have worked to keep hidden. From the open borders anarchy to cops bowing to BLM rioters and the public cesspools of California to the big city DA’s funded by George Soros to de-criminalize minor offenses, civil society seems to be unravelling. But this didn’t begin with the Biden/Harris regime, as Republican media outlets would have us believe.

The decline of urban America has many factors, most of which get overlooked amidst ongoing histrionics over “racism.” One major factor was the disastrous Supreme Court ruling on Shelley vs. Kraemer in 1948 that nullified Freedom of Association and set the stage for further Constitutional injuries. I’ll be discussing this ruling at length.

The Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision proceeded to strip local authority at public schools under a similar guise of racial fairness. Although the Constitution is entirely silent on “education,” Washington politicians subsequently expanded federal powers with Great Society laws like LBJ’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. This led to fossilizing educational standards, administrative micro-management and eventually “woke” political advocacy in the classroom. Even the supportive Wikipedia calls the ESEA “the most far-reaching federal legislation affecting education ever passed by the United States Congress.” Derelict judges at many levels have allowed this anti-Constitutional assault on education to fester ever since, dragging U.S. schooling into the gutter.

Steady attacks on property rights of private business owners also hurt countless thousands of urban employers as well as factory towns in rural America. These efforts included nationalizing unions in 1935, with associated trespassing and blockades that soon followed. The explosion of federal bureaucracies since the 1960s (and exorbitant property taxes to pay for government schools) further weakened any lingering vestiges of private property, prompting businesses to flee urban settings or close entirely. Roosevelt’s infamous “court packing” threats intimidated the Supreme Court into backing his union interference in the late 1930s. Other court abdications are more difficult to excuse.

SIDEBAR: Roosevelt’s court packing scheme of 1937. FDR lost on revising the bench count, but eventually got his way on numerous federal expansions (labor law, wage controls, forcing poor young workers to pay for rich old non-workers, free college for returning WW2 soldiers, etc.) all previously deemed beyond federal jurisdiction.

Just four years into Eugene Meyer’s reign at the Washington Post, the former Federal Reserve boss was already positioning his paper as an establishment trumpet. This front-page editorial from February 1937 echoes New Dealers’ talking points on “Jurists Pass Age of 70” and mythical “Delays in Justice” (well refuted by author John Flynn). WaPo also gushes how FDR’s “Plan Provides Additions” and describes (crazy bad guy) Herbert Hoover as “vehement in condemnation.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief and FDR-enthusiast, Arthur “you charm me so much” Krock, had similar difficulties remaining objective during this court-packing attempt, as detailed in a previous essay. Pro-Roosevelt broadcasters NBC and CBS were most likely even more biased, based on general knowledge of radio during that period.

Middle-class Flight from Court-triggered Urban Chaos in the 1950s and 60s

The combination of nullifying Freedom of Association, federal interference in childhood education, and eviscerating property rights soon wreaked havoc on urban communities. Scores of American cities were transformed from bustling cultural centers with safe streets and competent schools to the jobless havens of crime and violence they have become today. What had once been home to millions of working-class citizens of various ethnicities (e.g., Irish, Polish, Italian, German, Jewish, African, etc.) were quickly emptied of their vitality and replaced with rapacious welfare grifters and “non-profit” race hustlers.

According to USA Today (who has only excuses for this failure), the top five U.S. cities with population losses from 1950 to 2018 were: Cleveland (losing 242,000 residents), Buffalo (277,000), Pittsburgh (376,000), St. Louis (556,000) and Detroit (an astounding 1.5 million). All of these shifts comprised at least 50% population declines, with St. Louis, Detroit and Pittsburgh each losing 64-65% of their 1950s citizenry. Other cities losing at least 40% of their populations since their peak (usually around 1960) include Dayton, OH, Scranton, PA, Niagara Falls, NY, Gary, IN, and Youngstown, OH.

And the downward trend is continuing. British newspaper The Independent predicts that “15,000 American cities… are expected to shrink in the range of 12–23 per cent” by 2100, based on a study from the University of Chicago. Associated declines in quality of life cannot even begin to be expressed in any of those figures.

Vengeful court rulings from 1948 through the 1970s also derailed the immense black progress experienced in America from the 1940s and 50s, while stoking generations of bitterness and hostility—something most white/black nationalists (and indoctrinated modern lawyers) suspiciously overlook.

The Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling of 1966 continued the patterns of encouraging criminal mayhem and establishing dual justice by expanding special “rights” for rapists and murderers that don’t apply to working Americans. (Businesses cannot legally say “no comment” when pushy federal regulators demand voluminous “compliance reports” and other intrusions.)

On the topic of “lawless hyper-legalism,” the latter part of the imbalance is less frequently aired in public forums, probably due to the insular nature of mainstream media along with the sadistic spirit democratic politics. Four sample areas (among so many to choose from) that I’ll focus on today include:

• Nationalizing local pollution
• Attempting to “regulate” bank fraud
• Medical racketeering and skyrocketing healthcare costs
• Wage Controls and associated perils

At least three of those areas (usually not medicine) are absolutely brimming with mandatory self-incrimination—an important topic that seems to be completely ignored by our modern lawfare industry who profits from this practice. This is one important area of judicial philosophy that separates Trump and Harris, although Republicans do a poor job of explaining it.

DISCLAIMER: I feel compelled to say this while I’m thinking of it. This essay is NOT another libertarian rant that every problem in the world can be solved by the “miracles of the marketplace.” Nor is it an anarchist diatribe that all government action is inherently evil.

While I agree that all levels of government, particularly the federal stratus, do way too much in most areas, I think it is both lazy and self-defeating to continuously wail Please Stop! to ruthless totalitarians who earnestly believe their millions of rules are “liberating” everyone.

Right-wing “sponsor me” cucks have employed such an approach for decades, constantly trying to shock us with the latest outrage of government overreach, followed by an urge to: A) just get angry and shake your fist in the air, B) get angry and vote for a lying politician who won’t do anything useful, and/or C) get angry and subscribe to their newsletter. None of that is working.

On the contrary, I will be suggesting a few new laws to address some protracted problems that cannot be solved with fantasies of the Good Ole Days when government “did nothing” and left predatory men to feast on a defenseless public.

The fact that (to my knowledge) none of these new ideas—all rather simple and straight forward—are being suggested from any traditional Left/Right pundits and politicians speaks to some many central weaknesses of our times. Namely, people who profit from chaos (like lawyers, college professors and full-time reporters) are terrible at creative problem solving. It simply goes against everything they thrive on.

And there’s another bunch of giant red flags on the lack of new ideas—particularly in the areas of bank fraud, medical racketeering and fascistic corporate privileges.

Liberal/left politicians absolutely LOVE new rules… unless, of course, those rules curb the power of their Big Pharma/Huge Military/Debt Dealer/Tech Tyrant sponsors or annoy their pro-abortion/LGBTQ shock troops.

Conservatives supposedly hate Hollywood, Fake News and anything that reeks of Big Government. Yet I can’t find ONE right-wing pundit willing to suggest ideas like: A) taking away the bogus federal “copyright” privileges that are the lifeblood of dump-and-run media, B) recognizing the entirely unnecessary and harmful nature of bribe-based journalism (i.e., corporate advertisements), or C) expanding personal liberty with the basic concept that I own my name and image; you swine in Fake News cannot ever use them without my permission… which you will never be granted.

Beyond that, I understand conservatives simply hate new ideas… unless it involves new methods of flag-waving like the recent ‘Flagstock’ event in North Carolina or this dazzling performance from country legend Toby Keith.

I don’t think the oligarchs and ruling elites in Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Schools, Giant Military, Debt Dealers, Tech Tyrants, etc. are too worried about conservatives ever curbing their power. Only conservatives take conservatives seriously.

Lawfare Gone Wild, Exhibit A: Nationalizing local pollution

As criminals run amok in most U.S. cities and even suburban communities huddle in a state of continuous lock-down, companies now hire 1.2 million private security guards to keep the bad guys out. Meanwhile, what’s left of America’s once-thriving industrial base is smothered with unbelievable layers of costly bureaucratic pre-crime “permitting” mandates and self-incriminating “compliance” reports. Yet somehow, this reality never seeps out into the public conscience.

To borrow from my 2020 essay Swimming in the Government Sewage:

To give an example of EPA “regulations” enabled by one part of one law, in the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Standards (also called NESHAPs) developed from the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the words “must” and “shall” occur over 34,000 times. These include mandates how a company “must submit … must notify … must install” and excruciating details on what incriminating (often useless) records you “shall keep … shall provide.” It’s up to any given industry to figure out which few hundreds or thousands of those confusing rules apply to their operations.

An earlier edition of that same law (still in effect) offers another example of federal hostility to productive industry. The Clean Air Act of 1970 created something called New Source Review (NSR), a giveaway to high-polluting “existing” facilities, as long as they didn’t engage in the murky definition of a process “modification.” As of 2008, a brochure for training services at a New Source Review Workshop (run by a former EPA chief of their NSR Section) boasted:

“This course… focuses on how the most important of the over 13,300 pages of policy documents and related materials issued since 1974 interpret and affect the NSR rules.”

As I noted in that 2020 essay, these two examples just relate to portions of one law regarding air pollution. That doesn’t count complex rules for solid waste management, remediation, wastewater and stormwater discharges, the dubious fields of toxicology and air dispersion modeling, ESG madness and endless written “plans” to address risks, spills, pollution prevention, contingencies, etc. We can only guess how many thousands of manufacturing facilities have been chased out of the country—to less bureaucratic Mexico or China—largely because of these burdens.

And this is just the “environmental” sector of modern lawfare. There are many more areas of abuse. But it does reveal a major flaw in our system of governance. Namely, the EPA is one of numerous federal bureaucracies who now write, judge and enforce their own encyclopedia of rules, fees, fines and expensive mandates on defenseless business owners.

Dozens of more federal agencies—like the Departments of Education and Energy, CDC, DEA, DOT, EEOC, FAA, FCC, FDA, FEMA, FERC, HHS, HUD, IRS, OSHA, NEA, SEC, USACE, USDA—all engage in similar multi-faceted roles, with no voter input and minimal Congressional oversight. Yet lawyers and other college graduates (who dominate politics and mass media) still perpetuate myths of “democratic” representation and accompanying “checks and balances,” which have been absent since the 1960s and in many cases the 1930s. (Americans can escape some of those rules by abandoning industry and moving to retail and service jobs, as millions have done. This has created an imbalance of a growing throng of people trying to “serve” a declining base of production. It is not sustainable.)

And here’s the thing as far as eco-lawfare is concerned. Almost every bit of it is either illegal, contrived or misdirects public attention from *real* public health concerns. And most of it could have been avoided if industry wasn’t such a bunch of dishonest slobs up through the 1960s.

First of all, there is no legitimate federal role in most cases of “environmental” impact. That is because most pollution is local. You will notice on the Texas map below (provided by the state environmental agency) that even in “severely” polluted regions like greater Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, which have combined metro populations of 15 million, smog (ozone) impacts do not cross any state lines. And those tiny green boxes of SO2 hot spots—caused by heavy industries like oil refineries and coal power plants—are so trivial that the (minor) nuisance conditions rarely cross a county border; but the thousands of productive jobs associated with those plants once helped millions of people to live much healthier lives.

The same pattern holds for less-populated areas from Michigan to Ohio to Upstate New York and dozens of other states where Congress foolishly gave EPA inter-state jurisdiction. Air pollution is a local concern in regions where lots of people drive hydrocarbon-powered vehicles and heat their homes with natural gas; minimal local industry may add to that condition. And all of it is immensely beneficial to society… as compared to the primitive existence that Greens prefer.

And keep in mind that industrial water and land impacts are usually even more localized than the somewhat expansive nature of air emissions. (The same cannot be said of socialized farming and government sewage dumping, by the way.)

If courts respected our Constitutional framework at all, rogue federal agencies like EPA would be told to bug off and mind their own affairs on matters of local pollution. (Trump was fairly good in this area, while Biden/Harris have been terrible.)

Second, EPA and Green activists are willfully blind to other non-industrial pollution issues that affect millions of Americans. These include thousands of public beach closures and millions of associated sick swimmers each year caused by reckless government sewage and stormwater handling and the routine fish kills, multiple large aquatic “dead zones,” nitrate water well poisoning and other problems caused by subsidized agribusiness.

If you follow the “environmental” movement closely, you may notice that these folks are demonstrably more anti-industry than anti-pollution. That helps with their perpetual fundraising efforts. And it turns many eco-zealots into puritanical fanatics.

All of those items are discussed at length in my 14,000-word essay Swimming in the Government Sewage. If conservatives ever decide to stop fussing about “environmentalist whackos” and start addressing those issues, they might win over some youth voters who care about these topics. And they might, for once, have some credibility when they (rightly) oppose the multi-trillion-dollar scam of climate apocalypse.

While inter-state pollution from government sewage dumping and socialized farming continues relentlessly, the Supreme Court has been encouraging national control of local industrial pollution (i.e., “eco-fascism”) for decades. This unbalanced approach has decimated our energy sector, oil refineries and other core businesses with hundreds of plant closures. For example, EPA says that the number of primary steel plants in the U.S. “has decreased from 20 (owned by 14 firms) in 2001 to 8 (owned by two firms)” as of today. Refineries and coal power suffered much worse.

This destruction was encouraged by flawed rulings such as Chevron vs. NRDC (1984) and Massachusetts vs. EPA (2007) that expanded arbitrary federal powers, lately under the guise of climate change. Only in 2022 did the court majority finally move towards more respect for Congressional rule of law and a semblance of due process for productive businesses, such as the decision on West Virginia vs. EPA. I’ll address all three cases later in this essay.

Third and perhaps most important from a leadership standpoint, industrial leaders (and their conservative supporters) are mostly to blame for the eco-fascist mess we’re in. This is because Washington only stepped up after decades of corporate denials that pollution existed at all.

If anyone in corporate America or the Republican Party had shown common sense in the 1950s and 60s on pollution topics, the environment could have been cleaned up long ago without all of the arbitrary harassment described above. Beyond that, to keep things moving, I’ll leave my other thoughts on environmental progress to the second part of this essay.

Lawfare Gone Wild, Exhibit B: Attempting to “regulate” bank fraud

Political favoritism for the banking class is, of course, nothing new. Financial elites initially enriched themselves with special “charter” privileges such as the Royal charter granted to the corrupt East India Company in 1600. Similarly in America, state and federal charters have been awarded to USA banks since the 1780s. When that wasn’t enough, politicians in the 1930s helped Debt Dealers facilitate their practices with FDIC insurance. More recently, Congress has conjured a new gimmick: a blizzard of paperwork to distract everyone from the core issue. That is, trying to “regulate” fraud—as in turning every $1 of reserves into $5 or $10 of loans—something banks have been doing for centuries.

As of today, state and federal malfeasance on banking is a bipartisan disaster that has dragged us into countless wars and has now pushed the nation into over $100 trillion in total debt. (Sorry to disappoint any hardcore “liberty” types out there, but this problem did not start in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act. That is pure hokum for click-bait and fundraising purposes.)

Congress increased its pantomime routine in the 1960s, pretending to “get tough” with banks while approving their core business model. As noted in a 2021 essay “Financial False Hope”:

Following the welfare and racial revolutions of the turbulent 1960s, Washington further intervened in the banking industry with the so-called Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and finally the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977. All of these laws catered to racial bitterness and division, while asserting that banks—for no valid reason whatsoever—refused to loan to credit-worthy minorities although such activity is inherently against a bank’s own profit motive in the first place.

More recently, politicians upped their game with the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 under the guise of “consumer protection.” According to the Wall Street Journal (5/30/16):

• The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law has led to over 22,200 pages of rules.
• The six largest U.S. banks spent at least $70.2 billion on compliance in 2013, up from $34.7 billion in 2007.
• The nation’s largest bank, J.P. Morgan, had 43,000 compliance staff in 2015, up from 24,000 in 2011.

As noted before (and conveniently overlooked by WSJ):

Despite that flurry of paperwork, banks are still free to participate in fractional-reserve lending without any disclosure whatsoever to their customers. Along with “legal tender” edicts, those hidden gems are nothing less than the lynch-pins of the entire bubble financial system and our massive debt tsunami. Truly, corporate favoritism and bureaucratic irrelevancy at their finest.

And what could the politicians do better to rein in fiat banking abuses? Actually, not much different than we are already doing at every gas station in America: enforce basic standards of weights and measures (an explicit Constitutional duty) as in routinely monitoring the actual pounds of gold and silver a bank has in its vaults and matching that against outstanding loans. As detailed in a 2020 essay on “Financial Follies,” such an approach should not be complicated or burdensome to enforce. A similar policy of enforcing basic weights and measures at gas stations has worked for over a century to avoid the following inflationary skimming of motor vehicle fuels:

If that sounds like too much “big government” for anyone, I’d appreciate someone explaining why it works so well for gas stations?

I’ll go out on a limb and presume that all of the major gas station chains combined—Chevron, Exxon, Kwik-Trip, Race Track, etc.—don’t need anywhere near “43,000 compliance staff” to ensure that (say) a gallon of 87 octane gasoline is exactly that, with no inflationary debasement whatsoever. That’s because the energy business allows open competition, with effective state oversight on weights and measures—not arbitrary federal “regulation” of a closed cartel.

Alternatively, for any economists that still insist “inflation is good,” I’d love to hear why is it only good for wealthy bankers? If credit creation, money multiplying and price inflation are all beneficial… then why not extend those privileges to the general public? (In a “well-regulated” manner, of course.)

Instead of the universal basic income that many liberals now advocate, we could just allow people in selected income ranges to periodically convert a few $20 bills (a responsible 10% equity stake) by adding an extra zero in the corners. This would instantly transform each one into a $200 bill—a net gain of $180 per note. Further details of this Universal Credit concept are explained in my 2021 essay cited above.

To commemorate the unnecessary death of George Floyd—who was arrested in Minneapolis for alleged “credit creation” involving a couple fiat $20 bills found in his possession—I propose that Universal Credit be established on currency designed in his honor. Added markings can be left to public discretion:

Let’s recall that under USA’s roughly $30 trillion economy, the mystical 2% inflation target amounts to a staggering $600 billion in wealth transfers from Main Street producers to Wall Street speculators. Since real inflation is about 7 to 8% higher than the official BLS numbers, according to John Williams’ ShadowStats tracking, we now have trillions siphoned off every year that goes overwhelmingly into the pockets of large corporations and rich investors, who are first in line at the monetary hydrant. And ruling elites don’t like their special privileges being shared with the masses.

For the banking sector’s pattern of fiat debasement masked by hyper-legalism, perhaps we can’t blame the current Supreme Court too much. But we can blame our Revolutionary Royals (predominantly lawyers) for using bank fraud to finance their war, and debt slavery to pay back their political patrons. Their reckless hatred for British authority blinded them to what any educated person should have understood all along. And the lawyers who dominate Congress have kept the scam going ever since.

Lawfare Gone Wild, Exhibit C: Medical racketeering and skyrocketing healthcare costs

The skyrocketing healthcare costs and shabby medical treatment that Americans have experienced for decades has at least three elements of associated lawfare, none of which receive much attention in legacy media. In chronological order, I’ll start with the oldest, most pervasive, yet carefully avoided elephant in the hospital room: Titles of Nobility.

You’d never know this from listening to medical or legal scholars, but the Constitution explicitly prohibits any state-granted titles. And for good reason. That is, the dazzling arrogance of such Titles of Nobility blinds the recipient to his own limitations, rewards servility with political favor, blocks the consumer from accessing better and cheaper alternative treatment (in the case of medical care) and perpetuates a class system of approved/unapproved individuals to the benefit of legacy insiders.

What does the U.S. Constitution say on the wicked practice of entitlements? Actually, quite a bit. Article I, Section 9 states:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution adds:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

Considering all that, one may ask: What’s so confusing about “No Title of Nobility shall be granted… of any kind whatever”? Where exactly is the mental breakdown on “No State shall… grant any Title of Nobility”?

Law school indoctrination must be baffling to young legal students. Because any intelligent non-lawyer (like this one) can figure out:

Every ‘license’ the state grants to a doctor, pharmacist, engineer, lawyer, etc. to do what the average person is prohibited from doing is a ‘Title of Nobility’ by another name. … That’s why doctors went along with the vax scam; they were fearful of losing their licenses which would essentially cancel their income. This is extortion by the back door.

And it gets better. During the Revolutionary period, Titles of Nobility were despised by Americans and recognized as one of major downfalls of the British monarchy. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84, wrote:

Nothing need be said to illustrate the importance of the prohibition of titles of nobility. This may truly be denominated the corner-stone of republican government; for so long as they are excluded, there can never be serious danger that the government will be any other than that of the people.

Perhaps Mr. Hamilton & Company were a bit naïve. They believed that the Peoples’ Will in their new republic would thwart off the malignant tendency of aristocratic royalty to obtain special titles and the privileges conferred therein. Apparently, our Revolutionary elites didn’t bother attaching financial penalties to people who violate the Constitutional prohibition on state-granted titles.

Their oversight—which could be clarified with a simple majority in Congress—is great for a few people but lousy for everyone else. As of today, college professors, doctors and the entire legal system thrive on exclusionary licensing scams—as do FCC broadcasting giants like ABC/NBC/CBS et al. Gazing into my economic crystal ball, I would wager that opening up the nearly $5 trillion U.S. medical industry to unrestricted competition (i.e., following the law) would save trillions within a few years. And it would likely also save thousands of lives by unshackling honest physicians from the corrupt medical system and broadening healthcare access to the poor. (Of course, any private-sector “quality control” certifications would still be legal and important. Rooting out the “quacks” is best achieved with more daylight and open markets, not with the AMA mafia running the show.)

If “economic liberalism” hadn’t died in the 1960s, state-granted titles in medicine and elsewhere would have been struck down long ago. Instead, millions of Americans still suffer from overpriced insurance, ambush pricing, long waiting lines and short service attention that the medical cartels inflict on their captive audience. (The fact the “small government” conservatives go along with all that abuse should tell anyone where GOP loyalties rest.)

Flashback 1959: A time when left-wing rebels cared more about patients’ rights than “abortion rights” (which had not yet been invented). This was Mad magazine’s back cover from July 1959: Great Moments in Medicine “Presenting the Bill.”

For a second major legal assault on our healthcare freedom, we have the American Medical Association’s ongoing scorched-earth campaign to crush competitors, minimize competition, maximize prestige and boost profits. AMA attempts to turn medicine into a cartel date back to its founding in 1847, as detailed in an essay by Lew Rockwell that originally appeared in Chronicles magazine in 1994. Another in-depth account of U.S. medical licensing laws (1875-1900) by historian Ronald Hamowy working with the Mises Institute gives even more examples of AMA efforts to seize control of the medical industry during that period.

In the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, medical cartels finally succeeded in bribing and bullying state politicians to grant special authority to AMA (and only AMA) doctors trained to their philosophy of practice. After that, the Rockefeller and Carnegie clans stepped in to further institutionalize and control medicine with their infamous 1910 Flexner report seeking and winning closure of competing medical schools. Subsequent decades saw increased AMA scheming with politicians, as detailed in the sources linked in this section. Medical scholar and author of the book Flat Line, Stewart Donovan, wrote in a related 2014 essay:

At the beginning of the 20^th century, there were 166 medical schools. By the 1940s [despite U.S. population and economic growth] thanks to the AMA, there were 77.

Mr. Rockwell aptly summarizes AMA’s contribution to American medical care:

By the end of the Progressive Era, the orthodox profession as led by the AMA had triumphed over all of its competitors. Through the use of government power, it had come to control education, licensure, treatment, and price. Later it outcompeted fraternal medical insurance with the state-privileged and subsidized Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

… The monopoly also allows anti-customer practices to go unpunished. For example, doctors routinely schedule appointments too closely together so as to keep their waiting rooms full, for prestige and marketing reasons. With little competition, they can get away with it, and advertising on-time service would be “unethical.” The next time you have to wait 45 minutes amid six-month-old People magazines, thank the AMA.

If we ever get serious about medical reform, greater attention to AMA skullduggery—and imposing legal sanctions on that corrupt racketeering outfit—would certainly be warranted. But for this SCOTUS essay, I’ll move on.

For a third major issue concerning medical lawfare, let’s recall that the U.S. Constitution does not contain a single mention of words like “medicine” or “healthcare” or anything of that nature. How then, could the U.S. Congress invent federal authority in this vital area ranging from the federal tax exemption for corporate health insurance in 1943 to the Medicaid/Medicare plunder of 1965? And how did they proceed to craft the HMO Act of 1973 which lured more people into tax-favored corporate health plans and the 2010 splurge of corporate fascism known as Obamacare?

In general, the roughly $5 trillion U.S. medical blob and its underlying legal basis are great examples of the cycle of political incompetence leading to corporate abuse, then political corruption encouraging even more abuse. In medical governance, first we saw politicians refusing to do their duty via failures to enforce explicit prohibitions on state-granted favoritism. Next came their unwillingness to apply existing “RICO” anti-racketeering laws to the cartels at the AMA, state licensing boards, medical schools, and subsidized insurance giants. Now that corruption has spread across the entire medical system, we see the ongoing puritanical (and illegal) crusade to “save” everyone from the careless mess that the federal-state-corporate alliance created in the first place. What some might call “lawless hyper-legalism.”

In regards to our highest court of law, a majority of Supreme Court justices now either favor medical fascism outright (the Democrat block) or are too frightened of certain political fallout (some GOP appointees) if they were to do their job. One can sympathize with the latter group, since corporate favoritism is arguably a legislative error to begin with; hence, one could prefer a legislative solution. In theory, at least.

In 2012 the Supreme Court validated Obamacare in its entirety by a 5-4 ruling that saw one Republican appointee (John Roberts) joined by the block of Democrats (Ruth Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan). In the court’s rambling 193-page ruling and dissent (on the voluminous 900+ pages of Obamacare law and unintelligible 10,500+ pages of Obamacare regulations) the five judges in the majority supported the law’s controversial “individual mandate” for “minimum essential coverage.”

Mr. Roberts did summersaults to justify this coercive “shared responsibility payment” as just another “tax,” courtsplaining that “it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.” The four Democrat judges simply claimed anything involving “commerce” (i.e., everything) was fair game for federal control. Ms. Ginsburg added separately in her concurring opinion that any individual’s private healthcare decision is really an inter-state “concern of national dimension.” To think otherwise would be “stunningly retrogressive.” So there!

As a result of Obamacare’s intrusive “individual mandate” (which still stands, but now lacks IRS penalties) healthy young people are forced to subsidize middle-aged fat people and sickly old people and rich doctors and giant hospitals and bloated insurance companies. And Americans are still getting sicker, more depressed and fatter each year. Go figure!

In reality, the 1973 HMO Act did much of the same to anyone at a company offering corporate “benefits”—something you can turn down, but still pay for with lower wages. Since the 1973 law failed to contain healthcare costs, totalitarians in 2010 decided to do more of the same.

Then in 2021, seven Supreme Court justices including four GOP-appointees ruled to leave Obamacare in place despite a challenge from Republican attorneys general. Yet our legacy media still howls in agony that the court is “too conservative.”

Most ironic of all, the gargantuan spasm of federal-state-corporate interference on personal healthcare decisions now survives under the rubric of “liberalism” or “progressive” politics. If members of those same camps held to any logical consistency, they might consider it an attack on “personal autonomy” that some cite as an excuse to oppose any limitations on unrestricted access to abortion. But that’s not the case. I’ll get to Roe v. Wade a bit later.

Lawfare Gone Wild, Exhibit D: Wage Controls and associated perils

What could possibly go wrong when our Supreme Court confers unprecedented powers for federal politicians to intervene in complicated employer-employee decisions? Well, the feds did just that with their whimsical “Fair Labor” law of 1938. The Supreme Court—bullied into submission and replenished with an FDR majority by 1940—repeatedly approved their schemes via favorable rulings in 1941, 1943, 1944, 1946 and beyond.

Then all hell broke loose.

First off, FDR used his new powers as National Labor Czar to impose rationing and wage controls during his military crusade in Europe. While our boys were off saving Churchill and Stalin from their own imperial desires, Roosevelt’s economic planning boards were busy selling Rosie the Riveter a new system of corporate healthcare. (This was yet another bad side-effect of our “victory” during World War 2.)

As of 1940, the American Enterprise Institute states that “only 9 percent of the population had any form of coverage for medical expenses.” Most people back then paid for healthcare directly, which was affordable and responsive. After the war, the corporate tax-breaks that penalize individual coverage pushed a majority of Americans into employer-based group insurance. The race for subsidized health “benefits” took off and medical costs soon exploded. (Hence the public outrage at fairly modest healthcare inflation during the 1950s, as depicted in the Mad magazine cover from 1959.)

But arbitrary federal powers to micro-manage “fairness” in hiring, promotions and wages (always in view of extracting maximum labor/female/minority votes) didn’t stop there. A whole new bureaucracy—both governmental and corporate—would soon rise to the challenge under the auspices of “Human Resources.”

As celebrated by this professional community of Big Brother’s little helpers, the HR Alphabet Soup (free video and slides) consists of over 180 federal labor laws including ADA, ADEA, COBRA, Equal Pay Act of 1963, EEOC Title VII, ERISA, FLSA, FMLA, GINA, HIPAA, OFCCP, OWBPA, USERRA, and Workers’ Comp that private employers must sort through to stay out of trouble. If you don’t know what any of those acronyms stands for… better hire a bigger HR staff! Because one mistake can mean stiff fines, public shame or possible business closure.

That’s not some hypothetical. Hundreds of employers are harassed every day in the U.S. for unprovable (and indefensible) Thought Crimes of not hiring and promoting and coddling the proper levels of female and “minority” workers.

Created in 1965 to punish companies for allegedly harming their own businesses by hiring too many incompetent white males, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) now runs wild performing “high-tech lynching” for political exhilaration. As of Obama’s last year in 2016, EEOC terrorized U.S. businesses with 91,500 new charges of “discrimination” filed plus an additional 97,400 charges “resolved” by federal pressure. As of 2020 under Trump, those numbers relaxed to 67,400 charges filed and 70,800 resolved. The number of businesses that take preemptive action to avoid lawsuits and public humiliation can only be guessed.

By 1990, there would be an army of nearly 1 million HR commissars in the U.S. to help companies sort through that legal quagmire. And the opportunities for divisive pandering for special-interest vote harvesting have been nearly endless. Most of this madness was unleashed by the New Dealers’ “fair labor” act of 1938 (plus their nationalized union pandering in 1935) that our ambivalent Supreme Court has allowed to stand.

Who Benefits from all this Hyper-Legalism?

If you said “lawyers, consultants and politicians” that’s a good start. Let’s not forget the roughly 1 million HR employees noted above, about 600,000 corporate health insurance workers that never see a patient and nearly 3 million federal civilian staffers that oversee our administrative state of writing/enforcing/judging literally millions of their own rules. Another 19 million local government employees assist the feds in implementing those mandates.

To help facilitate that smothering straight-jacket on the economy, there are probably millions of additional busywork positions in everything from accounting to IT to financial services. Plus millions of low-wage retail and restaurant jobs to sell stuff to all of those hungry consumers. But very few primary jobs left actually “producing” anything of value.

As they say in the environmental community, this is not “sustainable.” But I suppose it’s fun for a while, before the gravy train goes completely off the rails.

The Lucrative Nature of Elite Lawcraft

At the top of the grifters food chain, we of course have the legal profession. If you look at American law firm rankings, you’ll see no less than 50 firms reaping over $1 billion in gross revenues in 2023. The top two firms took in a staggering $12 billion in total fees.

A bit more research via Wikipedia reveals that over 80 U.S. law firms net over $1 million in profit on average for each equity partner. Thirteen of those firms saw profits of over $5 million per partner. That mountain of cash buys a lot of fine art, hookers and scotch… and legions of political whores in Washington who get off on legal warfare.

Some of that money also gets recycled back into the university system that cranks out these courtesans in the first place—both on the front-end of hiring junior lawyers with college degrees, the later with tax-favored gifts to heavily endowed institutions. At present, all nine Supreme Court justices were fully indoctrinated by at least 20 years of monologue books and classroom lectures (K-12, +4 yr undergrad, +3 yr law school). This yields an extremely narrow perspective that is too insular to recognize its own shortcomings. It wasn’t always this way… but I’ll get to that later.

Moving on to Supreme Court “work” product, let’s start with a few reasonable decisions before the madness set in.

Flashback 1930s: When the Court had (some) Backbone to stand against Tyranny

Throughout FDR’s first term of March 1933 to January 1937, New Dealers were furious that the Supreme Court (occasionally) protected Americans from some of their more radical expansions of federal powers. Contrary to political hype then and now, the mid-1930s Court that invalidated some of FDR’s outlandish laws was not some collection of “staunch conservatives.”

From 1932 (Hoover’s last SCOTUS pick) until June 1937 when a member of the Court retired, the nine justices were rather diverse in background and philosophy. Perhaps most bizarre were the two remaining Democrat appointments of Woodrow Wilson. In 1914, James McReynolds was confirmed and would later be called “the most strident Court critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs” and supposedly a “bigot,” per Wikipedia’s stealth editors. Then in 1916, the Court’s first (atheist and converted Zionist) “Jew,” wild man trial lawyer Louis Brandeis, was confirmed. A small sense of Brandeis’s radical “Frankist” background and pompous attitude—writing dozens of public policy books despite have no experience outside of lawfare—are attested by the four prior links. Brandeis was a pioneer in weaponizing the federal government to attack private businesses and local communities. Thus, he is now lionized as a “progressive” hero.

Also on the 1932-37 Supreme Court was liberal Jew Benjamin Cardozo (confirmed in 1932) and liberal Republican Harlan Stone, a Coolidge nominee from 1925 who would later be promoted to Chief Justice by FDR in 1941.

Leading the “centrist” wing of the Court during the 1932-37 period was Chief Justice Charles Hughes, a Baptist from New York who had been the Republican candidate for President in 1916, narrowly losing to Wilson. Hoover nominee, Owen Roberts, was a swing vote that backed much of FDR’s legislation.

Conservative justices Willis Van Devanter (a Taft nominee from 1911), George Sutherland and Pierce Butler (both Harding nominees from 1922-23, one Mormon, one Catholic) along with the Democrat James McReynolds were reliable defenders of individual rights against federal encroachments. Totalitarian ideologues, then and now, denounce this bloc of justices in apocalyptic terms as the “Four Horsemen.”

What the Hughes Court Allowed

The Hughes Court of 1932-37 didn’t actually strike down that much of the New Deal’s extravagance. Two rather extreme measures that the Court allowed to stand were FDR’s illicit patronage schemes at CCC/WPA and seizing control of the power supply in the Tennessee region.

During FDR’s tenure in the White House, his Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration provided loyal Democrats with millions of patronage “jobs” digging ditches, planting trees and raking leaves at local parks—none of which are authorized federal actions. These programs were not just demeaning to any honorable person, but the faux-jobs manipulated official employment stats while hurting private-sector employers by tightening the labor pool. In total, they were an unqualified disaster in reducing unemployment during the 1930s. And the 25 million Americans who participated in one of the New Deal jobs programs were now infected with an entitlement mentality that still corrupts our nation to this day.

As for a federal role in producing and selling power at Tennessee Valley Authority hydro-electric dams and (old, inefficient, high-polluting) coal power plants, this expansion of Washington’s reach is not just another political slush fund. The 1933 TVA usurpation was the definition of corporate-state fascism—an unprecedented intrusion into private energy generation creating a conflict of interest with the government managing itself. It also gave Washington a later excuse to create the bloated U.S. Department of Energy in 1977, which now works to promote “climate” hysteria and dismantle reliable energy in favor of intermittent wind and solar power.

The “conservative” Supreme Court of Chief Justice Charles Hughes allowed those and many other federal expansions to proceed. One of the more egregious oversights was that Court’s failure—with similar refusals of every SCOTUS since then—to block the federal takeover of broadcasting launched by Hoover in 1927 and extended by Roosevelt in 1934.

Two of the better examples of the Supreme Court merely doing its job were the 1935-36 rebukes of FDR’s illegal schemes to seize control of the food supply and turn American business into a collection of corporate cartels.

What the Hughes Court Opposed: 1935 Ruling against New Deal corporate fascism

One of the New Deal brain trust’s more authoritarian debacles (prior to WW2) was their attempted conversion of American businesses into a closed shop of Soviet collectives. New Dealers obliquely called their law the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, with a similarly titled “NRA” federal agency invented to enforce their codes of “fair” competition for the benefit of big business and big labor.

Historian Robert Higgs explains that FDR and his cohorts were able to ensnare the vast majority of industrial production and “95% of all industrial employees” in his regressive codes on quantity, price and delivery method. Roosevelt’s NRA schemes were straight out of the handbook of economic fascism—complete with the mandatory symbolism of the ominous Blue Eagle and induced marches of civic pride. Very few corporate leaders dared to resist.

During its two years of existence, NRA code enforcers wreaked havoc on the economy and crushed anyone that got in its way. Just one of the many thousands of victims of FDR’s minions was a tailor from New Jersey, remembered decades later in Reason magazine:

Jacob Maged, a 49-year-old immigrant dry cleaner, spent three months in jail in 1934 for charging 35 cents to press a suit, rather than the NRA-mandated 40 cents.

Before contracting Trump Derangement Syndrome, George Will wrote more about Jacob Maged’s travails in a 2010 essay. The 2004 Reason article cited above explains the policy issues at hand, stating: “By setting the price of food and goods above market levels, the agency’s price controls made it that much more expensive for the nation’s poor and unemployed to provide for themselves and their families.”

The NRA industrial conquest was so contrary to established American freedoms that pro-FDR editors at Wikipedia compare the law to Germany’s infamous “Enabling Act” of 1933 (their link). It was this unpopular, failed, economic experiment that the Supreme Court unanimously struck down in their 1935 Schechter Poultry ruling, allowing FDR’s dubious public works programs to remain.

Hughes Court Opposition #2: 1936 Ruling against New Deal control of the Food Supply

Of all the hairbrained schemes put forth by New Deal academics, their 1933 “Agricultural Adjustment Act” may top the list in terms of raw insanity. At a time when millions were out of work and many were starving, it’s hard to fathom why anyone would deliberately destroy good crops and healthy livestock. But they did. And they did it with gusto.

A pro-farming website provides this historical photo and recounts the AAA as follows.

in the late spring of 1933, the federal government carried out “emergency livestock reductions.” In Nebraska, the government bought about 470,000 cattle and 438,000 pigs. Nationwide, six million hogs were purchased from desperate farmers. In the South, one million farmers were paid to plow under 10.4 million acres of cotton.

The hogs and cattle were simply killed. In Nebraska, thousands were shot and buried in deep pits.

This was the absurdity that FDR deemed wise and the U.S. Supreme Court would strike down in a 6-3 decision. All three liberals (Stone, Brandeis, Cardozo) dissented and explained that federal control of the food supply was justified because the Congressional power of “taxing” opened the door to absolutely anything. The Constitution’s specific and enumerated list of powers meant nothing.

The phrase “general welfare,” in their minds (like most liberals since then) did not mean universal rights over of sectarian favoritism, or anything of the sort. Those two magic words (cited 39 times in the court’s 1936 U.S. vs. Butler ruling; massaged, parsed and deconstructed beyond reckoning) reduced the Constitution to a mere bumper sticker. Their law school professors must have been proud!

But this would be the last time any Supreme Court challenged federal invention of new powers for quite a while afterwards. In 1942, a Democrat-majority Supreme Court reversed itself on FDR’s farm controls in particular and unlimited federal powers in general; see economist Walter Williams’ summary of Wickard vs. Filburn for details.

The Supreme Court after the New Deal

By the end of President Harry Truman’s only full term in January 1953, Democrats had controlled the White house for 20 years and selected all nine Supreme Court justices serving at the time. None of them showed any interest in returning power to the States or individuals now that their self-inflicted Depression and World War 2 “emergencies” were over. Even with a “conservative” revival of sorts in the 1980s, the centralization of power that had convulsed during the 1930s would march steadily forward until (arguably) the last few years, when President Donald Trump changed the balance of the court.

During the post-FDR period, the Supreme Court consistently expanded federal power at the expense of state and local authority. And this expansion of central authority is overwhelmingly celebrated in schools, entertainment and mass media.

Of course, government educators, dump-and-run “copyright” shysters and the federal broadcasting cartel all have vested interests in maintaining their perks and privileges. These entrenched professions don’t ever dare let on to their own conflicts of interest when it come to a congenital bias towards central planning. So combatting that bias needs to be considered.

As someone who works outside of those privileged confines, I’ll offer a de novo review on eight “landmark” cases that the Supreme Court has decided since the 1940s. These examples speak volumes, so I won’t have to say much in most cases. Relatively speaking… compared to over 400 pages of pretentious prolix and Latin smatterings of “amicus curiae, stare decisis” contained in those rulings.

In chronological order, the eight selected cases are:

• 1948 – Shelley vs. Kraemer nullifies Freedom of Association, triggers urban chaos
• 1964 – NYT vs. Sullivan: A giant leap for libelous ‘Free Speech’ phonies
• 1973 – Roe Bros thumb their nose at ‘settled science’
• 1984 – NRDC Lawyers lose the battle, but win Administrative ‘Deference’
• 2007 – Massachusetts Puritans launch a global ‘climate’ crusade
• 2012 – Court approves Obamacare with a word salad of nonsense
• 2022 – OSHA-Covid Ruling: Liberals tried (and failed) to impose vax mandates on everyone
• 2023 – LGBTQ lobby can’t compel speech at gunpoint (three liberal justices say they can)

For Dishonorable Mention, I’ll only make passing acknowledgement of the 1954 Brown decision (already covered) and the 1971 Griggs vs. Duke Power ruling, both of which advanced racial spoils for preferred “minorities” while harming educational independence. Both of those rulings were patently anti-liberty and unconstitutional on their face, two factors that meant nothing to our federal courts by the 1950s. However, since both rulings have been discussed elsewhere at great length, I’ll move on to other important cases. That includes the pivotal 1948 Shelley ruling that opened the door to federal interference on local housing and also race relations that the 1954 Brown decision merely continued.

For Disgraceful Mention, I’ll offer brief condolences to the victims of this year’s 6-3 Murthy vs. Missouri decision in favor of Biden/Big Tech censorship. It was no surprise that all three Court “liberals” came out for more suppression. The disappointing part was that three “conservatives” (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Barrett) joined the majority opinion that people injured by overt and proven censorship have “no standing” to confront their assailants. Instead of dwelling on this recent case, I’ll dig deeper into another “free speech” case from 1964 that flung the gates of Hades wide open for legacy media to smear at will.

For this portion of the essay, I’ll start with the easier cases and work up to the harder ones.

2022 – OSHA-Covid Ruling

It seems so long ago that America’s entire media-governing- medical–educational establishments, with extremely few exceptions, united as one to lock down the economy and impose tyrannical mandates over a rather dubious viral “emergency.” During the height of this coordinated clamor, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—a 1934 relic of the New Deal—claimed the authority to impose experimental gene therapy on anyone working at a company with 100 or more employees. This would immediately have impacted 80 million Americans—without their consent. No doubt every U.S. citizen would soon have joined their fate.

Three Democrat judges (Sotomayor, Breyer, Kagan) claimed OSHA had such a “right” and individuals had no right to opt out. The only sham alternative (likely to evaporate at the whim of health experts) was perpetual masking plus painful weekly covid testing. All three Trump appointees (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett) were joined by Thomas, Alito and Roberts voting in favor of personal liberty. So Americans dodged a bullet, or a “clot shot” as some call it.

The January 2022 Supreme Court ruling in the case of National Federation of Independent Business vs. OSHA has largely been forgotten. I can understand the embarrassment for Democrats. But I’m surprised that Republicans have failed to remind voters just how “extreme” their opponent’s court appointees still are. But we’re just getting started.

2023 – LGBTQ Lobby’s attempt to compel speech

For another recent example of “liberal” court logic, we have the case involving a Colorado woman named Lorie Smith, who owns a graphic design business called 303 Creative. Part of her business model included plans to expand into creating wedding announcement websites. Within that setting, she also wanted to exercise the freedom of conscience in deciding against promoting homosexual unions.

Being aware of recent harassment from LGBTQ activists (such as the 2018 case of Masterpiece Cakeshop that involved the same Colorado “queer police”), Ms. Smith initiated a lawsuit against the offensive state agency to protect herself from certain persecution. If the First Amendment had any significance, this case should have never have been necessary.

The lone Biden/Harris appointment to the Supreme Court, Ketanji Jackson, joined legacy Democratic justices (Sotomayor and Kagan) to side with the LGBTQ mob. Thankfully for Ms. Smith, all six GOP members of the Court recognized that free speech and freedom of religion did not become nullified when a group of pushy homosexuals demand a service they could easily obtain elsewhere. But that didn’t stop the totalitarian left from going berserk when their sexual advances were rebuffed.

To hide their contempt for freedom of conscience (and perhaps some latent religious bigotry) the three liberal judges rested their dissent on the canard of “public accommodations” law. Some of the problems with that argument are: A) the term “public accommodations” appears nowhere in the Constitution, B) the concept was inserted in a 1875 post-Civil War stunt and rejected 8-1 by the Supreme Court in 1883, and C) it was only resurrected in 1957 during a period of extreme hostility to individual rights that would soon trigger nationwide race riots.

Beyond that, the fatuous notion of “public accommodations” flips the entire Bill of Rights upside-down. Instead of protecting the rights of States and individuals against federal abuse, it weaponizes D.C. tyrants to trample the rights of States and individuals based merely on an accusation of “discrimination,” a nebulous Thought Crime that can never satisfactorily be disproven.

More fundamental to this concept, it should be obvious that every “private” business—including any restaurant, hotel or retail store—serves “public” clients. Hence the term “public accommodations” is absurd on face value. Creating some special class of businesses that demand special legal restraints is a level of sophistry that should never have made it out of any high school debate club.

But to non-working academic cranks, “public accommodations” jargon is the gateway drug to a lifetime of posturing against private “discrimination.” That, in turn, opens the door to unscrupulous politicians trolling for votes with demagoguery about “racism” and for unaccountable EEOC/CRA/HUD/IRS goons to terrorize anyone at whim. As they both do today.

Word Salad Sidebar: Hostis Curiae

Lest anyone fantasize that the Court’s six Republican judges have ushered in some new “conservative” Renaissance, guess again. In the Court’s “syllabus” statement of fact and fiction for the 303 Creative case, the majority baldly asserted:

To be sure, public accommodations laws [sic] play a vital role in realizing the civil rights of all Americans [sic], and governments in this country have a “compelling interest” [sic] in eliminating discrimination [sic] in places of public accommodation [double sic]. Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U. S. 609, 628.

It’s hard to imagine more gaslighting crammed into a single sentence, but it gets worse. And this is just one example of SCOTUS claiming supreme authority by quoting SCOTUS—as if we need to know that the 1984 Roberts decision spoke the words “compelling interest” into the public realm. The Court’s rambling 303 Creative decree made similar embellishments citing nearly 50 other SCOTUS decisions to mask their lack of legitimate Constitutional foundation.

What we essentially have in the 303 Creative ruling is a doggie treat thrown to the Religious Right for political expediency. The Deep State’s Revolutionary Guard maintain full power to terrorize any “non-religious” business for any reason whatsoever. And the EEOC did just that over 138,000 times in 2020, President Trump’s last year in office.

The dissenting opinion from the three Court Democrats was even more fantastic. They proclaimed:

Preventing the “unique evils” caused by “acts of invidious discrimination in the distribution of publicly available goods, services, and other advantages” is a compelling state interest “of the highest order.” Roberts, 468 U. S., at 624, 628; see Board of Directors of Rotary Int’l v. Rotary Club of Duarte, 481 U. S. 537, 549 (1987).

“Invidious discrimination.” And more SCOTUS citations! Oh boy!! In that case… anything you say, ladies.

To drive home their point, madams Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson added mountains of melodrama, such as this account of a homosexual complaint against a Mississippi funeral home in 2017 that had no bearing on the 303 Creative complaint:

Grief stricken, and now isolated and humiliated, the family desperately searches for another funeral home that will take the body. They eventually find one more than 70 miles away. … This ostracism, this otherness, is among the most distressing feelings that can be felt by our social species. … The men in this story are Robert “Bob” Huskey and John “Jack” Zawadski. Bob and Jack were a loving couple of 52 years. … They were 85 and 81 years old on their wedding day. A few months later, Bob’s health took a turn. He died the following spring.

If the Democrats win the White House in 2024, Americans—straight, queer and otherwise—will likely be “grief stricken” with one or two more Supreme Court nominations of people as confused and hostile to individual rights as the three dissenting lawyers cited above.

But Supreme Court hostility towards individuals and communities has roots back to the 1940s, when Democrats dominated the court and academic grandstanding was coming into vogue.

1948 – Shelley vs. Kraemer nullifies Freedom of Association

This largely forgotten ruling from the 1940s has immense impact on today’s culture, even though most professional “conservatives” are too timid to admit it. More than any other single Supreme Court ruling, it abolished Freedom of Association while inverting the entire purpose of the Constitution. As noted above, the enforcement of this decision set the stage for chasing millions of Americans out of once-thriving urban communities during the 1950s. Along with the dreadful 1954 Brown decision, it also encouraged hundreds of race riots of the 1960s and fueled the explosion of vile racial demagoguery that persists to this day. (Loss of essential freedoms can have serious impacts.)

While anyone alive in the 1940s had reason to be concerned about lingering white racism in some regions, launching a national crusade of social reformation was a terrible way to “fix” it. One of the best ways to combat systemic racism was already being utilized by millions of blacks since 1915; we now call it the Great Northward Migration. And the feds had almost nothing to do with it.

The convulsion of race riots in the 1960s should be evidence enough to sway any rational person as such. But sanctimonious “civil rights” advocates consistently fail to connect the 1948 Court’s revoking of Freedom of Association with the resultant urban chaos.

This glowing Wikipedia page on Shelley vs. Kraemer says nothing at all about race riots or the millions of people driven out of urban communities directly associated with that 1948 Supreme Court decision. I suspect at least 95% of law schools in America echo a similar blind allegiance to federal power at any cost.

Today, the government and major corporations routinely use race as the primary determining factor for hiring and promotion, which the Court generally supports. In 1948 the Court declared that private communities could not use race as a deciding factor in any way whatsoever. In this case, when a community in St. Louis wanted to protect its property value and peaceful nature by restricting access to unproven outsiders (who happened to be black), their decision was summarily rejected and overridden by a bunch of vigilante judges who lived in wealthy neighborhoods, most likely gated from outside intruders, guarded by paid security staff and without a single Person of Color within sight.

As of 1948, blacks were already free to buy open land and build their own community from the ground up, as many had previously done, or to find one of the thousands of existing communities in America that accepted black homeowners. But the activist lawyers pushing the Shelley’s lawsuit saw political violence as the only means to their goal.

Why should anyone still care about Freedom of Association?

For starters, the Court’s unanimous 1948 Shelley decree simply brushed aside the 1^st Amendment’s Freedom of Association provision as if it didn’t exist. This essential freedom—to “peaceably assemble” or associate with anyone as deemed worthy—had been understood and protected since the 1790s and even survived the New Deal spasms of the 1930s.

Freedom of Association had previously been a bedrock principle that encouraged America’s many thousands of free-standing businesses and communities to prosper, as they have a vested interest in the long-term profit, growth and stability of their organizations. Grandstanding judges and politicians have no real interest in any of those outcomes. But they had a self-righteous zeal that carried the day.

Building on that terrible foundation, the Court’s Shelley vs. Kraemer ruling turned the Constitution entirely upside-down, similar to what Democrats attempted in the 2023 LGBTQ case previously mentioned. Instead of limiting federal power as had been originally intended, the Court hid behind the excuse of “racism” (a malicious accusation of ambiguous Thought Crime) to now limit the individual freedom of millions of homeowners. In the worldview of the 1948 Court, the Constitution was no longer a shield to protect against federal abuses, but a weapon to advance them.

America’s drunken stupor following the “victory” of World War 2 left the country wide open to this frontal attack on historical liberties. Quite appropriately, the Shelley ruling sprung from another righteous outpouring of national violence—Lincoln’s wrath against the South. The 1948 Supreme Court decree rested on the “equal protection” clause of the 14^th Amendment of 1868 that had previously emboldened federal action against uncooperative States in the 19^th century. It was now being fashioned to wage war on private homeowners—soon millions of them.

With open disdain for individual liberties of property rights and free assembly, the Shelley ruling gave group grievance politics a great boost of energy. Roosevelt had started group exploitation with his 1935 nationalization of labor unions, injecting arbitrary federal power into labor-management negotiations and prolonging the Depression.

The FDR-Truman selections on the 1948 Court (which included one liberal Republican, Harvard graduate Harold Burton) then expanded grievance politics by pandering to blacks as a group for special protection in housing. The same logic would be employed in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that unleashed federal interference in local school admissions, again with the excuse that white “racism” justified any national response whatsoever.

Unlimited federal powers would run wild in the 1960s with the creation of the Welfare State that cost American taxpayers a staggering $22 trillion in its first 50 years and turned hundreds of urban communities into permanent cesspools of violence and despair. By then, the Supreme Court was a willing accomplice, rubber stamping imaginary new federal authorities and hiding their injustices behind flowery grandiloquence.

During that same period, any mythical residues of “checks and balances” were abandoned entirely, replacing elected officials with Washington bureaucracies that write their own rules, enforce their own mandates, then pass administrative judgment whether their rules are being fairly applied. This unchecked madness now terrorizes working Americans at the hands of relentless staff at dozens of clandestine agencies—micro-managing everything from Agriculture to Energy and Retirement Planning to Wage Controls. All eager to justify their existence by vilifying individuals and private enterprise.

And our legacy media has cheered for welfare, warfare, and racial revenge ever since then.

1964 – New York Times vs. Sullivan

On the topic of mass-media charlatans rooting for chaos, America’s corrupted court systems have handed us the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, for decades over 99.9% of regular people were blocked from broadcasting their viewpoints thanks to the federal takeover of radio (and later television) via 1927 and 1934 U.S. laws, as discussed at length in a previous essay. On the other hand, our derelict legal institutions have expanded sham “rights” for legacy media companies to destroy anyone at whim via vicious slander and libel campaigns against people, businesses and groups they dislike.

The “free speech” phonies of our day (which include many in alternative media) manage to get it wrong on both accounts. They commonly pretend those momentous 1927/1934 laws don’t exist, while arguing vociferously for their own right to smear anyone for public amusement.

Is there a better way? I sure think so. As for broadening access, the internet has brought more balance and accountability to political reporting than anything since the Printing Press of the 1450s. Accordingly, politicians then and now want to restrict public access and are working relentlessly to achieve that end. And broadcast TV still has the upper hand.

But the other side of the equation (protecting people from character assassination) sees no improvement whatsoever. If anything, libel and slander are more rampant now than ever. And that’s not good for a bunch of reasons. Just a few of those reasons are: A) the avalanche of injurious personal attacks assures at least 99% of Americans would never dream of running for public office, B) the extremely few people willing to put up with that abuse are usually sociopaths, fools or megalomaniacs to begin with, C) on the off chance that some rich patriotic “hero” breaks through the chaos (perhaps Trump on a good day) he will be torn to shreds by the Slander Mobs and any of his good ideas will be nullified.

As for “how” we might curb (not eliminate) pervasive libel and slander, I would start with the core principle of personal liberty. That is, recognizing that I own my name and image. And that’s true for everyone, including politicians and elite college athletes, for good reason. Powerful media conglomerates have no legitimate right to use my name or image (or yours) without my express permission, which will rarely be authorized in my case. Politicians could grant limited permission as they deem fit, since they love attention. Of course, quoting a written opinion (like a Court ruling) would be fair game. But that doesn’t mean opening the barn doors for lying media swine to roam free.

Let’s not forget that the original arguments for “free speech” were all about open exchange of ideas—not personal attacks. To cite just a single page of the Court’s 303 Creative (LGBTQ) ruling from 2023:

• … the freedom to think and speak is among our inalienable human rights.
• … the freedom of thought and speech is “indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”
• By allowing all views to flourish, the framers understood…”
• … the government may not interfere with “an uninhibited marketplace of ideas”

I’ll spare you the chapter & verse embellishments, because it really doesn’t matter which Founding Radical or Supreme Lawgiver uttered them. The point that’s been forgotten is expressing “political truth” was never equated to spewing venomous personal attacks against people who are not present to defend themselves.

Our legacy media is now almost entirely devoted to the latter, with only jingoistic platitudes for the former. And that’s what you get when courts give sweeping privileges to dump-and-run “copyright” hacks. Pure chaos. No hint of solutions.

In more civilized times, no competent ruler would have put up with that. In fact, no capable parent, boss or Girl Scout troop leader would tolerate such open contempt from their ostensible “subordinates.”

But the weak leadership inherent with “democracy” means elected “leaders” only pretend to have authority. It’s the sociopaths in the shadows who really run the show. With most genuine freedoms now erased, the public has to settle for chanting Let’s Go Brandon or vile utterances of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And our sham spokesmen of the Left/Right “sponsor me” crowd are just fine with that.

As for the 1964 NYT vs. Sullivan case, Wikipedia does a fair job in recounting the names and dates, while distracting everyone with a flurry of jargon about “civil rights.” You may have noticed, uniparty pundits love to toss that lofty term around when they really mean racial privileges (at minimum) or calls for racial revenge punishments. Political extremists have been smearing and lying about racial matters for so long, they just can’t face the damage they have wrought.

Back in 1960, the smear merchants at NYT published a full-page ad by MLK supporters that vilified the Montgomery, AL police department with numerous false accusations. These attacks appealed to national politicians to put pressure on local police and make it more difficult to maintain order. The ad also encouraged black militants to more anti-social behavior, precisely seeking to “create such a crisis” as Marty King would later put it, to overwhelm local law enforcement.

The Alabama Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in favor of Police Chief Sullivan revealed that NYT was well aware of the false nature of the “civil rights” hooligans’ ad. Among the more damning evidence of NYT libel came from its own local correspondents from Atlanta and Montgomery, Claude Sitton and Dan McKee. The Alabama court ruling stated:

After the receipt of the letter from the plaintiff, The Times had McKee, its “string” correspondent in Montgomery, and Sitton, its staff correspondent in Atlanta, investigate the truthfulness of the allegations in the advertisement. Their lengthy telegraphic reports, introduced in evidence showed that the Alabama College officials had informed them that the statement that the dining room at the College had been padlocked to starve the students into submission was absolutely false…

The inflammatory 1960 “civil rights” ad also falsely claimed that “truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas ringed the Alabama State College Campus.” Actually, police were just nearby. The ad wildly exaggerated violence against King and his family, the NYT’s internal review (used as court evidence) revealed. On top of that, lawyers for NYT lied in court that “McKee was not its agent,” in a move to quash the case. But the lower court denied the motion.

For those and other reasons, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the local court’s judgment of $500,000 against the New York Times. The newspaper then appealed to the nation’s top bench.

The 1964 SCOTUS ruling in favor of NYT acknowledged all of those and other false statements in the 1960 advertisement. In the first paragraph of the Court’s syllabus, the woke justices abandoned any pretense of objectivity by praising the black militants’ “civil rights demonstration” and the “civil rights movement” in general. This was an activist Court on the prowl.

They proceeded to invoke the novel concept that injurious public smearing of people (whom the NYT and Supreme Court clearly disliked) was fine as long as the offending party did not show “actual malice.” To prove that, a plaintiff had to show “that the statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” Which is nearly impossible. It’s like Thought Crime apologetics in reverse, since totalitarian bigots always claim to be acting from the purist of motives.

In reality, the 1964 Court ruling was a triumph for dishonest journalism and a defeat for personal autonomy. A year after the Sullivan ruling, federal broadcasters were openly inciting hatred of Southern whites by making comparisons of local law enforcement to “Nazi bigotry” and “Nazi storm troopers.” Pretty soon, cities would burn and anyone who got in the rioters’ way could be assured of public vilification. So quite naturally, fewer and fewer people dared to challenge the increasingly anti-social elements of American culture.

Citing law school royalty, Wikipedia now gushes that: “New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.” That warped opinion speaks volumes about our present legal community.

Next, I’ll jump ahead a generation forward to an influential case with a rather odd name.

1984 – NRDC Lawyers and Administrative ‘Deference’

Imagine a bunch of tax-favored hypocrites cheering wildly for an army of faceless bureaucrats to inflict more pain. And envision that army being so great in number that it could fill about 30 of the largest sporting arenas in America. Complete that picture with a productive, law-abiding company (such as Chevon) that serves the public and pays its full share of government tribute, but is saddled with its own misguided lawyers.

When a Supreme Court ruling in 1984 gave broad latitude for federal bureaucrats to arbitrarily expand their interpretive powers with no Congressional authorization—briefly favoring state and industrial flexibility in this case, more often doing the opposite—what might you call that?

I can think of many ways to describe such a reckless expansion of federal authority. For decades, deceitful lawyers and their friends in media have called it Chevron deference.

The origins of this perplexing “deference” took a while to develop. In late 1981, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and other anti-industry groups filed a case against EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. They were trying to block a favorable Reagan reform that would make it easier for plants to expand (Clean Air Act “netting”) if they demonstrated no increase in pollution. In 1982, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the anti-industry groups and against the EPA reforms at hand.

In 1984, Chevron appealed that ruling and the “Supreme Court issued a unanimous 6–0 decision in favor of the EPA that reversed the judgment of the D.C. Circuit,” in Wikipedia’s bland summary. What then seemed like a minor victory for business turned out to be a loss, as Democrats would eventually regain the White House and fill their agencies with activists more averse to industry.

If businesses had been wiser long ago, they could have pushed for objective LIMITS on air pollution levels (similar to speed limits) to be enforced uniformly on everyone, preferably by state and local authorities who normally aren’t so hostile to productive industry. Instead, they fiercely resisted ANY anti-pollution laws and got saddled with a host of arbitrary “regulations” on voluminous pre-crime “permitting,” self-monitoring, self-reporting, self-incrimination and the vagaries of Potential to Emit, etc.

All of that makes it nearly impossible for heavy industry (paper, cement, steel, power, refineries, etc.) to expand or build new facilities. Which is precisely what anti-industry activists passionately desire.

By all accounts, the Chevron ruling for EPA latitude had implications far beyond environmental affairs. Wikipedia’s long entry for this 1984 ruling states: “Chevron is probably the most frequently cited case in American administrative law”—a misnomer since only Congress can make laws, but otherwise probably accurate. They add: “Chevron was one of the most important decisions in U.S. administrative law [sic] and was cited in thousands of cases.”

This why liberals who hate “Big Oil” still love the arbitrary power that Chevron Inc. fought for and “won” in 1984. When the U.S. Supreme Court recently curbed those arbitrary federal powers ever so slightly in their 2024 Loper decision, liberals went berserk.

But the “conservative” 6-3 ruling against so-called Chevron deference did nothing to undo past accomplishments of the Administrative State. So the federal blob and its encyclopedia of rules hasn’t shrunken a bit.

2007 – Massachusetts Puritans launch a global ‘climate’ crusade

For this topic, I’ll keep it fairly simple and switch to more of a visual presentation. That’s only fair, since the “other side” of Puritanical eco-zealots has nothing to offer but slogans and hysteria. And their visuals suck.

Beyond that… the Court’s majority opinion begins with pure political fantasy and goes downhill from there. While rejecting the contrary view from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (probably weak under the George W. Bush administration at the time), the five trained lawyers claimed:

A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related.

The five lawyers forgot to mention that the “respected scientists” they relied on are almost always on the government payroll and have a conflict of interest in pushing for more funding of this non-existent threat. Since the Obama years (if not sooner), if you want federal funding on climate science, you better go along with the manufactured “consensus.” Federal funding for climate hysteria led to at least “88,125 English-language climate papers published between 2012 and 2020,” according to researchers at Cornell University.

Scientifically, the problems with man-made climate doom are enormous but downplayed by Green activists, university researchers and anti-capitalists of all stripes. Those include the fact that water vapor is a far more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2, the urban heat island effect, and biased weather stations—not to mention over 50 years of failed apocalyptic climate predictions. Back to some visuals…

Cornell chemistry professor Dave Collum is one of the few remaining academics at an elite school with anything original to say on climate topics. His “year in review” mega-essays are always informative and entertaining. Public policy expert Scott Tinker has also done good work to educate the public on the connection between “energy poverty” and economic depravity. Too bad that brainwashed kids at public schools probably don’t hear any of that.

Getting back to the 2007 SCOTUS decision, Justice Scalia’s dissent was more insightful than the majority opinion. It correctly began: “this Court has no jurisdiction to decide this case because petitioners lack standing.” It ended with a rebuke of the majority’s flimsy declaration that CO2 (which is beneficial plant food) is supposedly a dangerous “pollutant”:

It follows that everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an “air pollutant.” This reading of the statute defies common sense.

The five trained lawyers who posed as science experts in 2007 opened the door for wasting over $100 trillion chasing this ridiculous anti-human, anti-growth doomsday fantasy. A few bad judges can sure do a lot of damage.

Thanks to activist SCOTUS decrees, the barbarians are now roaming freely inside the walls. After decades of posing as “too pure for profit,” anti-industry extremists are out for blood.

How about one more visual for this section…

Emboldened by the Court’s 2007 ruling, President Obama’s EPA tried to kill the remaining fleet of coal power plants under the guise of its 2015 “clean power plan.” That rule and other forms of bureaucratic harassment nearly succeeded, with hundreds of power plants shut down in the past decade. In 2022, with three Trump selections on the bench, the Supreme Court finally injected some limits to EPA’s arbitrary power. The three Democrat musketeers on the Court, showing no understanding of “science” or the Constitution, snarled in their West Virginia vs. EPA dissent:

Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action [sic] to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.

A more disturbing prospect is that three Supreme Court justices still believe that “expert” agencies have free license to go on a “climate” crusade and promote deadly energy poverty with no scientific or legal authority. I believe that is far more “frightening.”

2012 – Court approves Obamacare

Moving on to another “deadly” decision, the practical problems of this unfortunate 5-4 Supreme Court ruling were addressed above in the section on Lawfare Gone Wild, Exhibit C. Since this was a decision based overwhelmingly on political expediency, here I’ll look at the word salad of nonsense tossed out to justify this grandiose experiment in nationalized healthcare.

For clerical purposes, the first two terms are political jargon with a positive connotation. Just because politicians used those words in the expansive Obamacare law doesn’t necessarily mean “independent” judges need to keep repeating them, ad nauseum. Unless, of course, they are not really independent at all.

The next two pairs of terms are political descriptions with a negative connotation. According to the unofficial guidelines of modern jurisprudence, these negative terms may only be used when punching down on unpopular outsiders. (e.g., OPEC cartel, extreme far-right fascist).

The final two terms are copied verbatim from the U.S. Constitution and have direct application to making healthcare “affordable.” Supreme Court justices profess to cherish that document more than life itself. While they routinely invent new terms that appear nowhere in that enshrined relic, they somehow manage to overlook major concepts clearly spelled out therein.

Simplicity and repetition have always been crucial to regimes intent on mass conformity. With all nine current Supreme Court justices being fully educated at undergraduate college and law school (usually Harvard or Yale), one would hope they learned about that.

1973 – Intro to ‘Roe’

For this last topic of the day, I’ve decided to keep it short and postpone for recess. Just for a couple months. This essay is getting long (I get it) and I need a break. For a more comprehensive review of this convoluted SCOTUS decision, I’ll try to put something together for the next anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which was handed down on January 22, 1973.

For all the feminist outcry that “only women” can have an opinion on this controversial topic—since only women can get pregnant—it’s oddly forgotten that all seven of the activist judges in the pro-abortion Roe majority were… either really ugly women, or crusty old men. See their 1973 glamour shot below for evidence.

Those seven old men, after some deliberation, summarily cancelled the laws from all 50 states and declared open season on pre-born humans for the first 9 months of life. Should anyone really care? Perhaps. I’ll get to that.

For today, I’ll start with some general observations. First of all, single-issue extremists on either side of this issue often do a disservice to their own causes. Conservative pro-war zealots who moan about the “sanctity of life” for tiny babies aren’t fooling anyone. Likewise, totalitarian liberals who are anti-choice on education, anti-choice on vax mandates, anti-choice on self-defense, anti-choice on energy, anti-choice on hiring decisions and pro-government on everything are only fooling themselves when they wail about “reproductive rights” and one particular “choice.”

But another person’s hypocrisy doesn’t make me “right” about anything. As for the “science” behind this ruling, I was surprised to learn how much knowledge existed by the mid-1960s pointing in the direction that life begins at conception.

One such bit of evidence available at that time was Planned Parenthood (now America’s leading abortion advocates) referring to abortion as something that “kills a baby” in their own brochures. That is, before abortion became safe, legal and profitable. Planned Parenthood’s 1960s brochure “Plan Your Children for health and happiness” promoted artificial birth control at a time when it was still controversial. That promotional flier contained a Question & Answer section as follows:

It is an operation?

It is not an operation of any kind.

Is it an abortion?

Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun.

In April 1965, Life magazine’s famous cover feature “Life Before Birth” showed state-of-the-art photos of human development and explicitly stated that life starts at conception. There was no scientific push-back at the time to this finding. For those and other reasons, the understanding that abortion kills innocent life was settled science by the mid-1960s.

The judges on the pro-abortion side used a different line of reasoning. Author of the majority opinion, Harry Blackmun, reflected on the ancient Greco-Roman period, claiming:

There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth. This was the belief of the Stoics.

Beyond that, the pro-abortion judges talked a lot about “liberty” and “privacy,” as they suddenly recognized it. Never mind that the Supreme Court as of 1973 had assembled a terrible track record on “liberty” for living adults when it came to long-established rights like Freedom of Association, property rights, and Freedom of the Press for those of us without FCC privileges.

As for federal Court authority to wipe away state laws and local community standards under the guise of “privacy,” the 1973 SCOTUS majority latched onto another ridiculous ruling, the Griswold vs. Connecticut decision of 1965. In that ruling, seven activist judges invoked “zones of privacy”—not literally in the Constitution—by figuratively in the “emanations” of the “penumbras” of the Bill of Rights. That is, in the vapors of the shadows of a Constitution they otherwise despised.

In the larger sense, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision’s greatest harm to society was (arguably) the damage it did to state sovereignty and community standards. The 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe merely returned this contentious and multi-faceted issue back to states and communities to wrestle with.

And for that, the totalitarian (anti-choice) Democrats and their media supporters see an unacceptable assault on their essential “liberties.” Kamala Harris shows her weakness by pandering to the most fanatical elements of her coalition and catering to their wild demands on this topic.

Former (and hopefully future) President Trump shows good leadership by rejecting calls from anti-abortion extremists to turn their ONE BIG passion into a nationwide Prohibition. Those people have evidently learned nothing from the 1920s experiment of Alcohol Prohibition, another moral crusade that backfired tremendously.

In my view, to what extent abortion should be legal has nothing to do with “morality” (another ruse) and has more to do about what kind of community people want to live in. For me, the question comes down to: Would I want to live next door to an abortion mill where women walked in carrying a child, then walked out barren?

I would say no. I tend to think premeditated violence of that nature has a corrosive effect on everyone it touches. But if community standards mean anything at all, they need to be debated, decided and enforced at the local (or perhaps state) level. Even if we know that some cities and states will make wildly divergent decisions—some of which may be tragic for those locations.

Since politics is the art of compromise, I’m fine if some folks in NYC and California want to exterminate their own kids. Seriously, go right ahead. They too should be respectful if Texans and others want to live in communities that hold a more tolerant view of the weakest members of society.

And that concludes my review of eight “landmark” Supreme Court cases spanning 1948 to 2023, with a few related decisions thrown in for good measure. A consistent theme you may have noticed in all of those cases was academic twits sure say a lot of nonsense.

And that’s still a “HUGE” problem today—as our next president (hopefully) likes to say.

What the Court needs most: some real ‘Diversity’

You’d never know this from listening to college professors, but for the first three centuries of the American experience, nearly all professional job skills were obtained via mentoring and apprenticeships. And they succeeded without subsidies.

As of 1850, college enrollment in the U.S. was below 2% among white men ages 16 to 25, and nearly zero for blacks and women, per The Independent Review, Spring 2014. The apprentice model got crowded out by an artificial resurgence of the university model in the 20^th century, precisely because of political subsidies.

As recently as 1941, FDR successfully installed Supreme Court justice James Byrnes, U.S. Senator from South Carolina (1931-1941), with no college whatsoever! In the biography for Mr. Byrnes, Wikipedia notes that he quit formal schooling at age 14 “to work in a law office, and became a court stenographer. … He later apprenticed to a lawyer, then a common practice, read for the law, and was admitted to the bar in 1903.” As a respected voice of moderation during the frenzied New Deal era, Mr. Byrnes later went on to serve as a WW2 director of economic planning, U.S. Secretary of State and finally Governor of his home state from 1951 to 1955.

At least three other Supreme Court justices served in the 20^th century with either no college at all (Mahlon Pitney) or having attended college but not finishing a law degree (Stanley Reed and Robert Jackson). So there is ample “past precedent” for this suggestion.

One valid candidate for future Supreme Court consideration would be former Milwaukee County Executive and Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. He has management experience, understands the law, and showed courage in standing up to organized bullies in his state. And by the way, he accomplished all that without obtaining a college “degree.”

There are probably hundreds of other qualified people with political and work experience but no college and/or law degree. Many of these people, after serving a few years on a lower court, would likely be suitable for federal bench duty. For a short-term boost to Court competency, I can think of nothing better than allowing someone from outside the insular law school establishment to breathe life into that collection of rusting academic cyborgs.

For a longer-term outlook, if anyone wants to get serious about improving the political landscape, a vital place to start is reforming the education system that grows future lawyers and judges. More than anything, the current Supreme Court is dramatically “unbalanced.”

Just how unbalanced is our current Court of Highest Opinion? Let’s look at the numbers.

No institution in the last thousand years has consistently done more to drag society backwards while elevating itself than the pious, ultra-orthodox, intolerant system of colleges and universities. These are not “radicals” in any sense of the word. By design, the university system breeds “subject matter experts” who too often devolve into unbalanced fanatics—a mix of conformists, control freaks and sniveling perfectionists. Perhaps amusing to listen to occasionally. But dangerous nonetheless.

At present, people who go directly from those artificial confines into teaching and/or government authority have a profound lack of experience that should disqualify them from public service. But lack of experience is now viewed as an honor. Actual prior “service” in the marketplace is sneered at as a joke.

Even in the best of situations, babbling academics are better at sounding intelligent than solving problems. Like their cohorts in lawfare, academics thrive on privilege for themselves and subjugation for the masses. In most cases, they are functionally incapable of coming up with creative solutions.

If I were to pick a “single issue” needing reform, it would be education. I’ve previously written about that in a 2019 essay at this website, provided a fair amount of it on the job, and hope to devote more time to this important topic in the future. Both writing and in the real world.

Conclusion

Society will always have its share of academic nitwits and anti-social crackpots eager to please the rich and powerful by pandering to the obscene. And it will always have others who, if they are not careful, spend a lifetime laboring under the delusions of those grotesquely imbalanced types.

Upon my review of these major legal cases and the entitled academics who produced them, three things seem apparent:

• A fool with a title is more dangerous than a fool without one.
• A subsidized scholar will say anything to remain in favor with his sponsor.
• A person trained by a subsidized fool with a title should never be given a lifetime appointment.

The U.S. Supreme Court now has more than its share of unbalanced fanatics with no record of service and no ability to govern. If Kamala Harris wins, she will most likely install many more dangerous academic crackpots to our nation’s federal court system, including its top bench. If Donald Trump wins, we may be spared from that agony.

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