Two items on corporatist jurists as a problem in a pluralist society; The Atlantic and The New Yorker expanding on the theme. Read both. Understand why Schumer will not be putting anything on the line to stop Trump putting another corporatist onto the Court in filling the Ginsberg seat, his way. McConnell and Schumer know donors, and without taking time to check, the bet here is that the Venn diagram of donors for one and the other will have a large overlap segment.
No justice, no peace, seems to have more spunk than Schumer.
_________UPDATE________
Sirota posts on the same foreseeable outcome of another Trumpster on board:
One huge question now is: How would adding another Donald Trump
appointee to the court potentially change the judicial system’s attitude
towards corporate power?
Bloomberg News
reports that “the prospect of Republicans increasing their majority to
6-3, after the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, could make the
court more favorable for business.”
For a deeper look at the situation, I spoke with UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, the author of the book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. He has also written a series of articlesfor The Atlantic about corporations’ winning streak at the high court.
What
follows is an edited transcript of my discussion with Winkler about the
current situation on the court and how the judicial system could
ultimately be reformed.
Q: In general, how much is the high court dealing with business and economic issues?
A:
While the high profile, controversial cases over issues like abortion
or gay rights take up all the headlines, most of the Supreme court's
docket is focused on ordinary business disputes and disputes that affect
businesses and business people. They're not all corporate power cases
directly in the sense that they're not like Citizens United
(and) about whether corporations can spend money on elections, but
they're issues like how do we read employment discrimination laws.
The Supreme Court just this past year
narrowly read federal employment discrimination laws to make it harder
for employees to bring an employment discrimination action. You don't
necessarily read that when you read it in the newspaper as a corporate
power issue, but it's clearly a corporate power case. It's giving powers
to corporate management and corporate employers and making it easier
for them to discriminate without the threat of significant legal
liability.
Then there are cases that don't seem like they touch
upon corporations at all, but have a huge impact on the ability of
government to regulate corporations.
So for instance, if the
court has what seems like a rather esoteric case about whether Congress
can structure a federal agency in a particular way so that it's
commissioners are appointed... there's a move afoot among conservatives
to outlaw appointments so that every executive appointment should be
subject to being fired by the president at the president's whim. That
doesn't seem like a business case, but the effect of it is to make it
harder for government agencies that regulate businesses to function.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be a good example.
The director can't be fired by the president (and) serves a certain
term of years. If you call that into question, it makes it easier for
businesses to escape regulation by the CFPB.
Q: You’ve
written about the Supreme Court’s rulings on speech issues have
strengthened corporate power. How does that matter to regular people in
their daily lives?
[... the link is above so follow it] In terms of no justice, no peace, Sirota is on record, cogently, calling out sophistry:
In the modern vernacular, that word “looting” is loaded -- it comes
with all sorts of race and class connotations. And we have to understand
that terms like “looting” are an example of the way our media often
imperceptibly trains us to think about economics, crime and punishment
in specific and skewed ways.
Working-class people pilfering
convenience-store goods is deemed “looting.” By contrast, rich folk and
corporations stealing billions of dollars during their class war is
considered good and necessary “public policy” -- aided and abetted by
arsonist politicians in Washington lighting the crime scene on fire to
try to cover everything up.
To really understand the deep
programming at work here, consider how the word “looting” is almost
never used to describe the plundering that has become the routine policy
of our government at a grand scale that is far larger than a vandalized
Target store.
Indeed, if looting is defined
in the dictionary as “to rob especially on a large scale” using
corruption, then these are 10 examples of looting that we rarely ever
call “looting”:
1. The Fed Bailed Out the Investor Class:
“Thanks to this massive government subsidy, large companies like Boeing
and Carnival Cruises were able to avoid taking money directly -- and
sidestep requirements to keep employees on.”
2. Millionaires To Reap 80% of Benefit From Tax Change In Coronavirus Stimulus:
“The change -- which alters what certain business owners are allowed to
deduct from their taxes -- will allow some of the nation’s wealthiest
to avoid nearly $82 billion of tax liability in 2020.”
[... the link is above so follow it]
BOTTOM LINE: Trump's appointee will favor "looting" in the sense Sirota derides, and will therefore be confirmed with Dem lip service to opposition, not burning any political capital, whatever the dimensions of "political capital" is these days in DC.
For all I know, "political capital" might be what, out of office, you use to get Martha's Vineyard key housing, acreage and a mansion. Just saying . . .
__________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Does "political capital" mean that unlike Italy, Spain and Germany in the '30s you can have effective two-party fascism in long running lockstep control of a nation?
Sirota again, a friend emailed:
Sirota nails it.
