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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Occupy SCOTUS (Also, Too, Vote for Obama)

Cornel West's righteous protest and subsequent arrest on the steps of the Supreme Court one week ago today provides Dahlia Lithwick a useful occasion to remind us that the Citizens United ruling, while dangerous, disastrous, and dingbatted, is hardly singular for all that but is in fact a representative decision in a suite of profoundly anti-democratizing corporatist decisions by the Roberts Court. And just as Citizens United is but the iceberg tip of Roberts' pernicious plutocratic Court so too resisting Citizens United must be taken as a key but also symbolic fight in a larger struggle against a host of recent epochal actions made by the Roberts Court.

I would be remiss if I did not mention in this context both -- first -- that the unprecedented obstructionism of the Republicans in the Senate has yielded a predictably unprecedented crisis of empty court benches as these Republican ideologues stonewall the confirmation of perfectly qualified judges across the board creating yet another crisis in the government that they so despise in word and deed even though for some reason some people keep electing them to govern in spite of their stated and proved hostility to the very idea of governing, and also -- second -- that the next President will likely appoint justices to the Supreme Court hence either consolidating or breaking the hold of the plutocrats (not to mention sexist assholes who want to take away women's right to choose) in that Court, one more reason to vote for Obama even if your despondency over your dashed hopes that he would be your own Personal Jesus and Sooper Dad makes you want to pretend that declaring "a plague on both your houses!" and taking your ball and going home represents some kind of radical politics in the service of progress rather than a profoundly disgusting selective abandonment of an indispensable however unedifying part of the field on which actual progress is convulsively exhaustingly heartbreakingly made.

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