Court’s reactionary 5 adds to national woes

The Supreme Court majority under Chief Justice Roberts has swiftly become the Five Horsemen of Reaction. The five justices are not judges but Republican politicians, every bit as fossilized as the Four Horsemen of Reaction who found New Deal laws unconstitutional.

The Roberts Court ordered resegregation of schools, endorsed sex discrimination, called the First Amendment irrelevant for students, ruled for Big Business and made money talk still louder in politics.

The court condemned race-based enrollment systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., toppling the greatest pillar of the Warren Court, Brown v. Board of Education.

Dissenting Justice Breyer said it was a “cruel distortion of history” for Roberts in his opinion for the court to compare the Seattle and Louisville cases to segregated school districts in the 1950s. Lawyers who worked in the Brown case denounced the decision as “preposterous” and “100 percent wrong.”

The Supreme Court was instrumental in rectifying historic wrongs and burying Jim Crow laws. Roberts and his shameful pols have reverted to separate and unequal schools.

Among the court’s many other egregious decisions this term was ruling against a woman who was making $6,500 less a year than the lowest paid male supervisor. The court’s ruling hinged on a technicality while overturning decades of precedent. The woman in the case, Lilly Ledbetter, did not learn within the required six months that she had been discriminated against.

The court ignored the reality of women in the workplace. As Justice Ginsburg said in dissent: the court “does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

Or sexual threats. One of Ledbetter’s bosses told her: “If you meet me at the Ramada Inn you can be No. 1. If you don’t, you’re on the bottom.”

The decision was made by five men, the same five--all Catholics--who upheld a horrible law barring late-term abortions. (A far, far better Catholic justice, William Brennan, voted for Roe v. Wade.)

Another repellent decision supported the principal of an Alaskan student suspended because he unfurled a banner declaring “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” Roberts said the student’s symbolic speech, as cryptic as it was, encouraged illegal drug use. (Bongs are marijuana water pipes.) Justice Stevens had it right in dissent:

“The court’s ham-handed…approach is deaf to the constitutional imperative to permit unfettered debate, even among high school students...inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs.”

Justice Thomas with his 13^th century mind sided with Roberts, as he had in the resegregation case, declaring that students should be denied free speech protection and urged return to the days when “teachers commanded and students obeyed.”

Ah, but money is a different matter. The court ruled that the First Amendment prohibits restrictions on political advertising, upholding the noxious doctrine that money is speech.

In yet another 5-4 vote evincing judicial activism from the Right, the court asked, in effect, what separation of church and state? There is none. The court blocked a lawsuit by a group of atheists and agnostics against the faith-based White House office. The office was created by executive order to give religious charities a share of federal money. You need not be a lawyer to see that as unconstitutional.

Still another outrage: the court overturned an Oregon jury award of $79.5 million in punitive damages against Philip Morris for the harm it caused smokers. It was a victory for corporate wrongdoers whose products have caused widespread injury. It follows a Roberts Court pattern: rule for the powerful over the powerless.

Ohio State law professor, Douglas Berman, made an astute observation after the court refused to grant certiorari in the case of an Arizona man sentenced to 200 years in jail for possessing 20 pornographic pictures of children. Berman pointed out: “Justices think they have a role in regulating extreme corporate punishment but…the court doesn’t embrace a role in regulating individual punishment.”

In still another repellent 5-4 ruling in one of the worst terms in Supreme Court history, the court sided with developers against environmentalists.

The biggest disappointment was Justice Kennedy. It had been hoped that he would play the pivotal role of Justice O’Connor. Instead, he joined the reaction of Roberts, Thomas and Justices Scalia and Alito.

President Bush, with his appointment of Roberts and Alito, ruined the Supreme Court just as he has ruined the nation.

The great Justice Louis Brandeis, dissenting in the New State Ice Co. case in 1932, said: “we must be ever on our guard lest we erect our prejudices into legal principles.” The Roberts Court has done just that.