[Mb-civic] Supreme Court - Media Ignore Possible "Fascist" Play

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0705-31.htm

Published on Tuesday, July 5, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Supreme Court - Media Ignore Possible "Fascist" Play
by Thom Hartmann
 
The Bush administration is spectacularly good at sleight-of-hand tricks, 
directing public attention in one direction while they're working diligently 
in another. The latest trial balloon of "probable" Supreme Court 
nominees is no exception.

While everybody is worried about abortion rights and corporate power, 
a far more insidious agenda may be at play.

Anti-abortion forces and women's rights groups alike are up in arms 
about the possibility that the next nominee may or may not have an 
opinion about the Court's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment (and 
others) in Roe v. Wade. This battle is being loudly played out in the 
mainstream corporate media, with every analysis and question 
ultimately turning back to Roe.

Because Alberto Gonzales isn't on the record with regard to abortion 
rights, both sides are wary of him.

At the same time, corporatist "conservatives" are salivating at the 
opportunity to pack the Court with judges who will further erode the 
rights of communities and increase the power of multinational 
corporations and the super-rich in America. On June 28, 2005 The 
Wall Street Journal ran a major story ("For a High Court Nomination, 
Business Has Its Own Agenda") on how corporate Republicans may 
be at odds with "social" Republicans, because the latter generally 
endorse states' rights. Corporatists prefer a strong federal government 
where all politicians can be bought centrally in Washington, DC, and 
federal rules and agencies can be used to back down states that may 
want clean air or water.

Because Alberto Gonzales has a very limited record in ruling or writing 
on corporate rights and powers, the corporatists are not as 
enthusiastic about him as they are about others.

What nobody seems to be noticing, though, is what may well be the 
real agenda of George W. Bush and those around him - neo-fascism.

For this agenda, Alberto Gonzales is the perfect man.

Although he testified that "I don't recall today whether I was in 
agreement with the analysis" on the meeting that led to the infamous 
2002 torture memo that said "injury such as death, organ failure, or 
serious impairment of body functions - [are necessary] in order to 
constitute torture," he actually chaired the committee that drafted it. As 
The Washington Post noted on January 5, 2003 ("Gonzales Helped 
Set Course On Detainees"), "White House counsel Alberto R. 
Gonzales chaired the meetings on this issue, which included detailed 
descriptions of interrogation techniques such as 'waterboarding,' a 
tactic intended to make detainees feel as if they are drowning."

Gonzales looked over death penalty cases in Texas as Governor 
Bush's counsel, and, according to an article in The Atlantic Monthly 
and others, contributed to an environment in which children, mentally 
retarded persons, and almost certainly innocent men were executed by 
Bush's order. In 2001, he helped draft Executive Order 13233, which 
began the shutdown of the transparency and accountability that have 
been hallmarks of American government since its inception. In 2002 
he argued that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and that their 
language was sufficiently vague that the Bush administration could 
essentially ignore them.

He also wrote a Presidential Order saying that terror suspects could be 
tried by secret military tribunals and sentenced to death, and 
enthusiastically pushed for passage of the USA PATRIOT Act just as 
Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle and Democratic Senate 
Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy - the two men in the 
Senate who could have shot down the PATRIOT Act - were receiving 
anthrax in the mail. Today, as Attorney General, the investigation of 
that terrorist incident is entirely in his hands.

There is no official count at the moment as to how many people have 
died at the hands of our interrogators since Gonzales authored his 
infamous memo, or how many people have been turned over to 
torturers in other nations by a process euphemistically called 
"extraordinary rendition." (Estimates run from a low of around 60 up 
into the thousands.) This is because Gonzales and others in the 
administration have led a process where, The New York Times notes, 
"government secrecy has reached a historic high by several measures, 
with federal departments classifying documents at the rate of 125 a 
minute..."

For that matter, we don't even know how many American citizens are, 
like Jose Padilla, currently "disappeared," being held incommunicado 
within or outside the United States, in clear violation of the Constitution 
but at the behest of the Bush administration. Such information is 
"classified."

Although the Supreme Court under Earl Warren declined to rule on the 
legality of LBJ's Vietnam War, a variety of anti-liberty dimensions of 
Bush's so-called "war on terror" are almost certain to end up before the 
Court. An administration that can use the final imprimatur of the 
Supreme Court to "disappear" dissidents, corral Democratic Party 
campaigners into "free speech zones" with guns and bayonets, and 
declare a perpetual "war on terror" to prevent any investigations of its 
failures and crimes doesn't need to worry about the politics of abortion. 
Or John Conyers snooping into voting machine irregularities in Ohio. 
Or any other political debate, for that matter.

The Framers of the Constitution didn't give to the Supreme Court the 
power to interpret the constitutionality of laws made by Congress. The 
Supreme Court itself did this, in an unanimous opinion written by the 
notorious Federalist Chief Justice John Marshall, in the case of Marbry 
v. Madison in 1803. This decision - handed down when Thomas 
Jefferson was president - so upset Jefferson that he suggested (in a 
letter to Abigail Adams on 9/11/1804) that if the Court were to fall into 
the wrong hands, it "would make the judiciary a despotic branch."

He noted in that letter that he tried to prevent this sort of danger within 
the courts in general by achieving balance between his own 
Democratic Republican Party (now called simply the Democratic Party) 
and the Federalists (who today are reincarnated as Republicans). "In 
making these appointments," he wrote, "I put in a proportion of 
federalists, equal, I believe, to the proportion they bear in numbers 
through the Union generally."

Jefferson added: "Both of our political parties, at least the honest part 
of them, agree conscientiously in the same object - the public good; 
but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting 
that good. ... One [the Federalists] fears most the ignorance of the 
people; the other [the Democratic Republicans], the selfishness of 
rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will 
prove."

The new Federalists - Bush's Republicans - clearly fear We The 
People, and cherish their own power to rule independent of us. And if 
they can seize control of the Supreme Court before the next elections, 
their power may become nearly absolute.

Historically, when fascists have come to power they have used either 
the threat of enemies or social issues to get the people to agree to give 
them control of all branches of government. When their true agenda - 
raw power - comes out, it's too late for the people to resist. As 
Francisco Franco famously said, "Our regime is [now] based on 
bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections."

Thus, the nomination of Gonzales, or another candidate with strong 
fascistic leanings but no clear abortion record, will probably be 
trumpeted in the mainstream corporate media as a triumph of 
"moderation" on the part of Bush (or a tribute to his "stubbornness" or 
his "loyalty").

In fact, it could mark the end of our 200+ year American experiment in 
democracy.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored 
Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated 
daily progressive talk show and a morning progressive talk show on 
KPOJ in Portland, Oregon. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent 
books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," 
"We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson 
Do?"

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