Justice on the Rocks: The Demise of the People’s Court
June 11, 2012
By John W. Whitehead
“Presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.”—William Howard Taft
When I was in law school, what gave me the impetus to become a civil
liberties attorney was seeing first-hand how much good could be done
through the justice system. Those were the years of the Warren Court
(1953-1969), when Earl Warren helmed the U.S. Supreme Court as Chief
Justice, alongside such luminaries as William J. Brennan, Jr., William
O. Douglas, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter and Thurgood Marshall.
The Warren Court handed down rulings that were instrumental in shoring
up critical legal safeguards against government abuse and
discrimination. Without the Warren Court, there would be no Miranda
warnings, no desegregation of the schools and no civil rights
protections for indigents. Yet more than any single ruling, what Warren
and his colleagues did best was embody what the Supreme Court should
always be—an institution established to intervene and protect the people
against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds.
That is no longer the case. In recent years, especially under the
leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, sound judgment and justice
have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while
preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to
play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests—a trend
that has not gone unnoticed by the American people. In fact, a recent New York Times/CBS News
poll found that just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the
Supreme Court is doing, while 75 percent say the justices’ decisions are
sometimes influenced by their personal or political views.
The Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years, characterized most often
by its abject deference to government authority, military and corporate
interests, have run the gamut from suppressing free speech activities
and justifying suspicionless strip searches and warrantless home
invasions to conferring constitutional rights on corporations, while
denying them to citizens. This outright regard for government authority
at the expense of individual freedoms is most apparent in the Supreme
Court’s most recent 8-0 ruling in Reichle v. Howards. In their
unanimous decision, the Court actually held that immunity protections
for law enforcement officials, specifically Secret Service agents, trump
the free speech rights of Americans.
Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, often a lone voice of reason on the
court in protecting Americans against government abuse, was hard-pressed
to separate her personal bias in favor of the Secret Service (which
also guards members of the Court) from the mandates of her job (to
ensure that the rights of the citizenry are protected). In backing the
Secret Service, the Supreme Court made it clear that when called on to
strike a balance between the reach of government and the rights of
Americans, government will win out virtually every time.
In this way, as the Christian Science Monitor rightly noted, the Court’s ruling in Reichle
“is consistent with a trend at the high court in recent years granting
government officials broad immunity from civil lawsuits charging that
officials used their government power to violate constitutional rights.”
For example, just the week before, the Supreme Court let stand a Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Brooks v. City of Seattle,
in which police officers who clearly used excessive force when they
repeatedly tasered a pregnant woman during a routine traffic stop were
granted immunity from prosecution. The Ninth Circuit actually
rationalized its ruling by claiming that the officers couldn’t have
known beyond a reasonable doubt that their actions—tasering a pregnant
woman who was not a threat in any way until she was unconscious—violated
the Fourth Amendment.
In Florence v. Burlington, a divided Supreme Court actually
prioritized making life easier for overworked jail officials over the
basic right of Americans to be free from debasing strip searches. In its
5-4 ruling, the Court declared that any person who is arrested and
processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her
offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic
offense), can be subjected to a virtual strip search by police or jail
officials, which involves exposing the genitals and the buttocks.
In an 8-1 ruling in Kentucky v. King, the Supreme Court placed
their trust in the discretion of police officers, rather than in the
dictates of the Constitution, when they gave police greater leeway to
break into homes or apartments without a warrant. Despite the fact that
the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the
wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between
us and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid,
leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner
of abuses by law enforcement officials.
Even the Court’s recent ruling in US v. Jones took great pains
not to limit the government’s ability to monitor our activities. The
ruling, which declared that police must get a search warrant before
using GPS technology to track criminal suspects, was written so narrowly
as to only apply to physical intrusions. In an age where we can easily
be tracked simply using invisible signals from our cell phones, this
amounts to little protection at all.
Moreover, in its landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United,
the Court favored corporate interests over democratic principles,
granting unfettered free speech rights to corporations. That case brings
us full circle back to Reichle, which by placing government
interests ahead of the free speech rights of the citizenry, reaffirmed
the prevailing mindset that reigns supreme at the Supreme Court
today—one that largely defers to government and corporations and, except
in the most extreme of circumstances, refrains from limiting or even
questioning the reach of government officials, whether it be the
president, the police or the military.
In the end, the law means nothing if it isn’t applied to human beings
compassionately. The reason judges sit on courts is to do justice. Yet
the members of the Supreme Court are part of a ruling aristocracy
composed of men and women who primarily come from privileged backgrounds
and who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Unless you’ve experienced life outside the rarefied, elitist circles in
which most of our judiciary operate, it is difficult to see the
humanity behind the facts of a case, let alone identify with the terror
and uncertainty that most people feel when heavily armed government
agents invade their homes, or subject them to a debasing strip search,
or taser them into submission. Likewise, if you’re not able to
understand what it’s like to be one of the “little guys,” afraid to lose
your home because some local government wants to commandeer it and sell
it to a larger developer for profit, it would be relatively easy to
rule, as the Supreme Court did in Kelo v. New London (2005), that the government is within its right to do so.
It also doesn’t help matters that Supreme Court justices are appointed
for life. Thomas Jefferson came to understand the dangers posed to
freedom by lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court. In a letter to
Monsieur A. Coray, Oct 31, 1823, Jefferson confided his worry that the
Court would end up doing more harm than good:
At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were
supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government.
Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the
most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their
removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their
decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and
unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless,
become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations
of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any
one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily
employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be
trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.
Less than 200 years later, Justice John Paul Stevens issued his own
warning that the Supreme Court had taken a turn for the worse.
Dissenting from the Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore in which the Court effectively decided the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush, Stevens declared:
It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial
system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day
heal the wound to the confidence that will be inflicted by today's
decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know
with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's
Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It
is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the
rule of law.
WC: 1481
|
 |
SHARE WITH A FRIEND
CLICK
HERE TO READ THIS COMMENTARY ONLINE
Please visit www.rutherford.org/OnTarget
to view
Whitehead's weekly video
commentaries.
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Constitutional attorney and author
John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. His new book The Freedom
Wars (TRI Press) is available online at www.amazon.com.
He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
Information about The Rutherford Institute is
available at www.rutherford.org
|
|
|
|
|
|
John W. Whitehead’s weekly
commentaries are available for publication to
newspapers and web publications at no charge.
Please contact marketing@rutherford.org
to obtain reprint permission.
Click here
to download a
print quality image of
John
W.
Whitehead. |
|
|
Post Office Box
7482
Charlottesville,
VA
22906-7482
Phone: 434-978-3888
Fax:
434-978-1789
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment