Sunday, October 23, 2005
I've watched the overall reaction to Harriet Miers with some amusement. According to the mainstream media this morning, it's looking doubtful she'll be confirmed - but I'm always dubious of the MSM. It always comes down to a vote sooner or later.
Two paranoid thoughts struck me first about her nomination.
1) Someone so obviously a crony and so obviously unqualified for the position on the court must have been nominated as a means to distract the media and the public from something else.
I tried to pay extra attention to the other news stories of the day - am I the only one who noticed that the broadcast of Saddam's trial was 20 minute delayed (so that, presumably, anything he said that offended the US, or could incite the Arabic world, could be cut).
Not one American media outlet I could find documented the differences between the broadcasted tape and the reality of the trial. I got kind of weirded out, actually, when the first facts I got from google news about the delay were from news sources in China and in Yemen!
I think justice would best be served in all cases by a fair and speedy trial - and, if broadcast, an uncensored one. It reeks of soviet-style oppression and of show trials for our supposedly open democracy to ever do otherwise.
2) The most important disqualification for Miers was not that her opinions on Roe vs Wade were unknown, but that she had spent her entire life mired in corporate law. The Supreme Court is the last recourse for persons to face down injustice ... and I regard the change in American law that gave corporations the legal rights of people to be seriously flawed. Putting a corporate representative in the supreme court bothers me at fundamentally deep level.
So I'm going to digress off the topic of her nomination for a while, and trust that the rest of the democratic process still works, even in what has largely been a rubber-stamp congress, and talk about the problems of corporatism.
In Miers we have the near-certainty of a justice that has bought completely into the legal fiction that corporations are people under the 14th amendment. If, in her record, was some balance of representation between the rights of corporations and rights of people, maybe even a youthful indulgence or two in ambulance chasing, I'd be more inclined to trust her sense of balancing the scales of justice. ¶ 9:54 AM
Two paranoid thoughts struck me first about her nomination.
1) Someone so obviously a crony and so obviously unqualified for the position on the court must have been nominated as a means to distract the media and the public from something else.
I tried to pay extra attention to the other news stories of the day - am I the only one who noticed that the broadcast of Saddam's trial was 20 minute delayed (so that, presumably, anything he said that offended the US, or could incite the Arabic world, could be cut).
Not one American media outlet I could find documented the differences between the broadcasted tape and the reality of the trial. I got kind of weirded out, actually, when the first facts I got from google news about the delay were from news sources in China and in Yemen!
I think justice would best be served in all cases by a fair and speedy trial - and, if broadcast, an uncensored one. It reeks of soviet-style oppression and of show trials for our supposedly open democracy to ever do otherwise.
2) The most important disqualification for Miers was not that her opinions on Roe vs Wade were unknown, but that she had spent her entire life mired in corporate law. The Supreme Court is the last recourse for persons to face down injustice ... and I regard the change in American law that gave corporations the legal rights of people to be seriously flawed. Putting a corporate representative in the supreme court bothers me at fundamentally deep level.
So I'm going to digress off the topic of her nomination for a while, and trust that the rest of the democratic process still works, even in what has largely been a rubber-stamp congress, and talk about the problems of corporatism.
- ... the British colonies were corporations chartered by the king and given the right to govern—such as the Virginia Corporation and the Massachusetts Bay Company—and that British law forced the colonists to trade under disadvantageous terms with the East India Company, the mother of all British crown corporations. So the American Revolution overthrew not only King George III's sovereignty over the colonies but also the power of the first huge corporations, and people of the era understood this. The distrust of corporations ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson proposed, unsuccessfully, that freedom from monopolies be included in the Bill of Rights. He later wrote, "I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
In Miers we have the near-certainty of a justice that has bought completely into the legal fiction that corporations are people under the 14th amendment. If, in her record, was some balance of representation between the rights of corporations and rights of people, maybe even a youthful indulgence or two in ambulance chasing, I'd be more inclined to trust her sense of balancing the scales of justice. ¶ 9:54 AM
