Gorsuch clerked for perhaps the most activist conservative judge to sit on the federal courts, Chief Judge Sentelle. There is little doubt he will add a fifth vote in favor of continuing the Buckley line of plutocratic decisions to defeat the four dissenting judges who have opposed them in cases like Citizens United and McCutcheon. In Riddle v. Hickenlooper , 742 F.3d 922 (10th Cir. 2014) Gorsuch, concurring, flagged his carefully worded support for the judicial supremacist propositions that "the act of contributing to political campaigns implicates a 'basic constitutional freedom,' one lying 'at the foundation of a free society' and enjoying a significant relationship to the right to speak and associate -- both expressly protected First Amendment activities."
Because Gorsuch claims that Justice Byron White, for whom he also clerked, had an important influence on him as a lawyer and judge it will be fair to ask him at his Senate hearings whether he agrees with Justice White's devastating dissent in Buckley from the majority's argument, which he described as rooted in the "maxim that 'money talks,' .... that money is speech and that limiting the flow of money to the speaker violates the First Amendment." If there is a Democrat with the capacity and integrity to do so, this is an opportunity to take an appointee through each unanswerable argument White made which there is insufficient room to discuss here in full. Most importantly, White pointed out that j ust as campaign finance restrictions do, many other laws, like taxes, also indirectly reduce the " communication made possible by" money. His question why those many laws are not also unconstitutional under the rule of Buckley that money is speech has never been answered.
Gorsuch also wrote the opinion that became, in Hobby Lobby, a further expansion of the corporate bill of rights by allowing employers to impose their religious ideas to deny employee benefits mandated by federal law. His argument for Hobby Lobby 's conservatively-correct anti-reproductive rights position, delegating to misogynist employers the "choice between abiding their religion or saving their business," was artfully buried among turgid argument over procedural matters. Gorsuch gained another notch in his belt for denying women's reproductive rights when, dissenting in another case, he made the policy choice to uphold Utah's action to defund Planned Parenthood.
That Trump has failed to appoint even a single person who could be identified with the anti-corruption mission that he claims will animate his administration, or with anything but orthodox Republican plutocracy and its right wing electoral alliances, not only gives the lie to his hollow rhetoric about a purported democracy "movement," but also presaged the kind of Supreme Court nominee he is sending up to the Senate for confirmation.
The public's response to Trump's speech has not been to hold him responsible for his claim to lead a pro-democracy movement, by for example appointing a justice committed to put a stop to the Court-driven corruption by overturning Buckley . If Trump is going to claim leadership of this priority progressive issue then progressives are entitled to demand that he reveal a credible strategy for returning control of government from corrupt politicians back to the people who are systematically betrayed by the bipartisan establishment for the benefit of pay-to-play plutocrats.
Instead the loudest response to Trump came whether directly or indirectly from the corrupt Clinton wing of the Democrats and their professional activist allies who themselves lack any credible strategy for getting money out of politics and restoring democracy. A march was organized by " leaders of non-profits, academia, politics and business matched up with donors" to pursue the same divide and conquer identity politics of the Clinton campaign . Identity politics is a neoliberal tactic. The political valence of these identities arises from their place in the plutocratic hierarchies that result from their common disfranchisement by money. Progressives seek the restoration of equal political rights by enfranchising all citizens irrespective of identity by taking money out of politics. Only then can all, of any identity, achieve their priority concerns together by democratic means.
It seems the same people who gave us Trump by supporting Clinton against Sanders are now intent on using up all the oxygen fueling outrage against Trump to inflame the same diversionary identity politics that, by nominating Clinton, lost the election to a faux populist. Instead of addressing the issue of democracy and the political corruption that has undermined it, as the Sanders' campaign did, this activity diverts attention away from the priority of enfranchising everyone by overthrowing the plutocracy to the tactic of demonstration by various identity groups devoid of strategy for achieving any concrete democratic gains for the majority who did not vote for Trump. As Sun Tsu famously said : "tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
A further example of the need for a progressive response to avoid noisy defeat relates to Trump's ambiguous calls for an investigation of 2016 election mechanics. During the campaign Trump tweeted: "I would rather run against Crooked Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders and that will happen because the books are cooked against Bernie! ... The dysfunctional system is totally rigged against him!"
Progressives would want Trump's election investigation to address the ways the election system was illegally rigged by Clinton Democrats against Sanders, including exit poll anomalies likely caused by unauditable, easily hackable voting machines and the hacking of registration data. If Trump diverts attention instead to the "voter fraud" fraud which could never account for more than a handful of the three million votes Trump suggests are in doubt, rather than the election fraud by or of election administrations which could, his hypocrisy needs to be again called out as more Trumpian demagoguery promoting voter suppression, the antithesis of democracy. But liberal Democrats are instead being led off in pursuit of phantom Russians.
What is needed is a trans-partisan progressive movement capable of attracting Trump's former followers who, having understood the meaning of his plutocratic appointments, executive orders, and tax breaks , can no longer trust his democratic pretenses. His Supreme Court appointee alone shows that the notion that a plutocrat would not ultimately serve plutocracy has failed.
This movement should also challenge the legitimacy and source of funding of the Clinton Democrats' and their identity politics which elected Trump, and should clearly not help energize them from the deep well of resentment against Trump. That resentment should equally target the Democrats who made his election possible.
It takes little organizing skill to unite people of color, LGBT, and the minority of white women who supported Clinton in a march expressing their solidarity against their common opponent who lost the popular vote. Such a march does not communicate much new information to others, except possibly the frustration of those liberal Democrats who were responsible for imposing Trump on the world. Such generalized negativity towards Trump does not advance any useful goal on which this opposition could agree.
It takes creativity to fashion an effective strategy that would restore democratic power to all people equally so that liberals can pursue their goals which plutocrats have often blocked in their four decade alliance with the right while others who have been disenfranchised can also achieve their goals of jobs and opportunity. "Stop the #SwampCabinet" constitutes a worthy provisional demand against plutocracy. Stop a Swamp Judge would be a more strategic slogan for recovering democracy going forward.
After the Republicans refused to consent to a fully qualified Judge Garland on political grounds (though he is in fact little different than Gorsuch) it is now clear that the fight at hand is not the sterile one over qualifications, but over the politics that will be conducted by judicial supremacists. A demand that the Democrats filibuster any Supreme Court nominee who does not commit to overturn Buckley would be strategic. We are otherwise far better off with the current ideologically deadlocked Court for the next four years, if Trump insists on his hypocrisy about restoring democracy by appointing a justice who will predictably perpetuate the Court's plutocratic corruption of politics since Buckley.
A credible strategy positive reform is needed to effectively drain the swamp that Trump promised but has not even attempted to deliver. Advocacy of such a positive strategy to restore democracy is the test of the bona fides of any movement seeking to harness opposition to Trump, as much as it is for judging Trump himself.*
* This article is based on the author's most recent book, "Strategy for Democracy: Why And How To Get Money Out of Politics," which is currently available as a free ebook . This is part of a multi-volume study assessing strategies for ending the political influence of special interest money that especially critiques the dominant Democratic liberal meme of advocacy for amending the Constitution and other piecemeal reforms. See "The Amendment Diversion."
(Article changed on February 1, 2017 at 05:18)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
1
