Following is the first installment in a continuing series based on excerpts derived from comments I’ve made on various Substack threads about the three things 18th Century French philosopher Voltaire said “exercise a constant influence over the minds of men: climate, government and religion.” Most of the comments assembled in this short essay pertain to government, but religion, lurking in the background whenever these matters are discussed, casts a menacing shadow over events, now more than ever under the thumb of a Supreme Court dominated by rightwing zealots. With the recent Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health ruling, which denies women the protection of privacy and reproductive liberty, a reactionary group of right-wing justices are imposing extreme religious ideology on the majority of Americans in an effort to codify their beliefs about abortion into law. This regrettable situation also reflects the policies of the GOP fascists in control of the current congress. In short, the Republicans are attempting to dictate national policy against the wishes of most of the citizens in our liberal, pluralistic society as established by Joe Biden’s election in 2022, a reality they cynically view as the “tyranny of the majority.”
This point, as poignantly illustrated by Mr. Fish in The Supreme Courtship, (above), is explained with such brevity and clarity by Robert Hubbell in the March 15, 2023 Today’s Edition Newsletter, his remarks are worth quoting in full. The ruling, as per Hubbell:
inflicted grievous injury on the rule of law, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. In ruling that the Constitution does not protect the right of privacy on which reproductive liberty is based, the Court violated judicial doctrines of interpretation and finality that are the bedrock of “ordered liberty” safeguarded by the third branch of government. But the reactionary majority was willing—even eager—to overthrow those foundational doctrines to codify the dogma of the conservative religious groups that engineered the appointment of the Court’s reactionary majority.
The ruling in Dobbs was wrapped in a lie—that the only issue was where the difficult decisions about reproductive liberty would be made. The reactionary majority claimed that it was returning those decisions to “the people’s representatives.” But that was never the goal of those who plotted the demise of Roe. They want nothing less than the complete, unqualified prohibition of abortion. Indeed, states are beginning to criminalize abortion, putting doctors, hospitals, taxi drivers, families, and friends at risk of charges of homicide and wrongful death for assisting a woman seeking to end a pregnancy.
These and numerous other fascist threats to our Constitutional guarantees extend into Voltaire’s realms of government and climate as well, all duly documented by the champions of Truth and Justice such as Robert Hubbell, Heather Cox Richardson, Jessica Craven, and many other activists and public intellectuals writing on Substack, but they all seem to bear witness to the stark realization that without a vigilant citizenry, Democracy and the Rule of Law are toast. Even before the Roe and Dobbs decisions, we knew the Supreme Court was a rogue institution, sans doute! Chief Justice Roberts had already made an ass of himself, while Justice Thomas and his right-wing Republican cronies in corruption succeeded in establishing the highest court in the land as an illegitimate arm of the Trump campaign to destroy democracy, sparking a smoldering rage among millions of Americans, a circumstance that inspired Texas Democrat Cathy Learoyd to write on Robert Hubbell’s thread, “It is time to smother the Republican Party out of existence. No one is going to take away my rights.”
Learoyd has a lot of allies. Numerous national polls show that the majority of Americans are in agreement with the Center for Reproductive Rights’s position that “Safe and legal abortion is a woman’s human right.” According to the organization’s briefing paper, “Each year nearly 70 million women have unwanted pregnancies…Governments should respect a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her reproductive life. A women who decides to have an abortion—as 46 million women do annually—must have access to the facilities and care that will enable her to terminate her pregnancy safely…Forcing a woman to undergo a life-threatening unsafe abortion threatens her right to life.” But as recent events have shown, far-right Christian fascists don’t care about majorities other than their own, and could care less about the Constitution or even an individual’s inalienable right to exist. The focus of their concern is control over others and ensuring that their ideology “trumps” the ideals of liberty and justice as guaranteed by the Law of the land. (pun intended)
Especially objectionable in that regard are the illegitimate Supreme Court Justices who lied during their confirmation hearings, a sitting Justice who refuses to recuse himself from cases involving his wife in the overwhelming face of evidence that she is an avowed supporter of the January 6 insurrection, and the disingenuous politicians like Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and several others who voted against the impeachment of Donald Trump. Speaking as one of the 84% of Americans polled recently by Pew who still believe justices should not mix politics with court decisions, it’s clear that Republican political operators bear most of the blame for this crisis, another blow in a long line of assaults on our Constitutional liberties by the GOP over the years. What president Franklin D. Roosevelt said in a speech at the Democratic convention in 1936 applies to the continuing Republican war against the Constitution and the rights of women raging in America in this watershed historical moment as well. Roosevelt spoke in the context of the Great Depression, but the fighting spirit of his words is apropos today: “It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization,” the president stated. “It is more than that; it a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”
The behavior of Republicans during our own troubled period in American history indicates that there are very few grown ups in their ranks. The GOP has revealed itself to be the party of vicious, cruel reactive babies who are incapable of making decisions that affect the administration of truth and justice for the common good. They seem to be interested in government intervention and largesse in the affairs of the electorate only when it benefits the Republican Party and its base of the wealthiest one percent of Americans. In a functional democratic society of mature, rational citizens, by contrast, sleazy politicians like Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the rest of their Trump-worshipping cronies would never have been elected to office. Fortunately, their influence is waning under a scrutiny of evidence exposing their nefarious ways and I suspect that their time is coming to an end. The Senate Republicans’ vote to deny benefits to veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and chemical agents, for example, a decision the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee chair called an “eleventh-hour act of cowardice,” reflects the GOP’s adversarial stance against the people and will hopefully suffice in convincing even the most recalcitrant alienated, apolitical factions of the 100 million Americans who typically decline to vote in elections, to go to the polls and exercise their Constitutional right to excise of tumor Republicanism from the body politic once and for all. Then perhaps, the government of the United States will be able to stop catering to the whims of autocrats, plutocrats and downright scoundrels and get back to the job of governing for the benefit of all the people, as the framers of the Constitution intended.
As Robert Hubbell succinctly stated in a recent blistering indictment of the proposed GOP plan for legislative chaos, the Republicans have declared themselves to be enemies of the people in their repudiation of the Constitution. Obviously this situation doesn’t jibe with the concept of good governance the Founders had in mind. But of course in the Republican lexicon, which is now defined by fascist protocols, the context of the “common good” isn’t a factor in the legislative equation. There’s clearly scant regard among this raggedy-ass assemblage of stooges for the provisions of the Constitution they all took an oath to protect and defend. What’s going on now far exceeds the usual internecine warfare amongst fascist ideologues and irresponsible leaders with wrong-headed intentions gone awry. The actions of the GOP today amount to a deliberate, vicious attack on the very foundations of decent government, and as Hubbell states the case, “the outrageous acts and dysfunctions” of the Republican Party “are relevant because they are the actions of a party that represents the greatest threat to our democracy in the last hundred years.” Our response as citizens should be commensurate to the gravity of the threat and instead of allowing them to take control of the House of Representatives, we the People should insist that the Republicans involved be arrested and charged with treason. Any faction that poses a chronic insult to the rule of law and the norms of democratic governance must be held accountable for its despicable actions, or we risk losing the Republic to illiberal forces.
Members of Congress are traditionally addressed as “Honorable” sir or madam in deference to the dignity of their office as representatives of the American people, but since most of them now primarily represent the interests of corporate lobbies and corrupt right-wing Christian fascist oligarchs rather than the citizens they’re elected to serve, and in the case of the Republicans, the whims and ego fulfillments of the fascist thug professor Paul Street called the “orange reptile,” the word honorable seems grossly misapplied. To wit: addressing Susan Collins as ‘honorable” is like calling Tony Dungy a “Christian.” (Tony Dungy is a right-wing zealot, anti-gay bigot and so-called “pro-life” advocate.) The Republicans who failed to vote for Trump’s impeachment and who have supported his criminal machinations ever since clearly fail to honor the virtues of the Constituion and the Rule of Law. These miscreant, officials comprise a significant number of sitting members of congress, half the justices on the Supreme Court, as well as Governors of Red states. They may not view themselves as villains, since narcissists have no shame, but in the context of our nation of laws, perhaps it’s time that we give them their due and address them as dishonorable, calling them what they truly are: traitors who pose a “clear and present danger” to the Republic. If they are not held accountable, we may as well tear up the constitution and start over.
The danger posed to American women is urgent and our failure to deal with these “domestic enemies” runs the risk that they will succeed in their quest to make abortion illegal in the United States. As Paul Street writes in The Paul Street Report, March 16, 2023:
A major step in that terrible direction is now underway. Any day now, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a handpicked Christian fascist federal judge in Texas is going to prohibit the safe and effective abortion pill mifepristone nationwide. Kacsmaryk is a far-right judge for whom women-hating Christian fascists went ‘shopping’ last year. His coming order is based on thoroughly false allegations about mifepristone’s safety and defies the six-year statute of limitations on challenges to FDA decisions. It ignores the anti-abortion plaintiffs’ lack of standing and flouts the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs returning abortion law to the states.
As previously stated, the Christian fascist assault against abortion was never really about returning abortion law to the states. As Chris Hedges, whose book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America is banned at most Christian schools, made clear in his June 28, 2022 Salon article, “The Supreme Court is relentlessly funding and empowering Christian fascism. It not only overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right to an abortion…it upheld the Trump administration regulation allowing employers to deny birth control coverage to female employees on religious grounds.” The Trump Supreme Court has made a lot of other anti-democratic moves in a fascist direction, mostly without a peep of resistance from the Democrats, which is why Biden should have forced the issue to expand the Court in order to restore the balance of power, but didn’t. As a result, “The moment of crisis is upon us,” as Robert Hubbell concludes, echoing the immortal words of President Abraham Lincoln: “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts,” he said, “not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” In our time, it’s clear that we need to add a lot of Republican women to Lincoln’s category of perverts.