October 27, 2020: Rape Babies and Founding Fathers

 

10/27/20: Team Trump keeps reminding us that we have rounded the corner and the pandemic is over. Today, the White House office of Science and Technology released a list of President Trump’s accomplishments since taking office. 

First on the list: “Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

 

Meanwhile, CDC would seem to believe the pandemic has not ended. The seven-day average shows the U.S. racking up 70,289 new cases, nearly a half million more in the last week.

 

Each day, 797 Americans on average, have died.

 

Those 5,579 dead this week will be happy (in heaven) to hear the coronavirus has been conquered.

Save for "gerrymandering," no one remembers what this Founding Father did.

 

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HOPEFULLY, we’re one week away from “turning the corner on Trump.” Reports are already circulating. If he wins he’s going to fire F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray. As Axios explains, “A win, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies.”

 

Trump’s complaints regarding Wray are all political and help us understand his total disregard for the rule of law. First, the president is angry because the F.B.I. hasn’t launched an investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business connections in time to help him win the election. Second, he’s fuming because Wray testified in front of Congress and said the F.B.I. had not seen any evidence of widespread voter fraud, not even involving “dreaded” mail-in ballots. Third, Trump wanted Wray to fire anyone who had anything to do with the Russia investigation, including the janitor who took out the trash. And we already know, Trump has said he believes Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe and Hunter Biden should be in jail.

 

Trials optional.

 

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HOW MUCH of a threat to democracy and the rule of law is this president, if unleashed for four more years?

 

We know GOP senators won’t stand in his path. Yesterday, they caved and voted to allow him to pack the U.S. Supreme Court. With eight days remaining until the election, they voted 52-48, with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine the lone Republican siding with Democrats and voting “no,” to advance Judge Amy Coney “Court Packing Dummy” Barrett to the highest court in the land.

 

This compares with almost all of those same 52 cowards insisting, in 2016, that with ten months left in President Obama’s second term, they dared not shirk their duty to protect the integrity of the Supreme Court. They could not in good conscience vote on his nominee to fill an empty seat.

 

Why?

 

Because they had to let the “people speak.” Let freedom ring!

 

Only now, they’ve removed the clapper from the bell. Expect Justice Barrett to get right down to business. She can vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and vote to blast the Affordable Care Act to flinders.

 

Let’s say you are pregnant because you were raped. With Justice Barrett casting the deciding vote, lawmakers in Alabama will soon be able to require you to have the baby. According to conservatives, this is as the Founding Fathers wanted it – even though the word “abortion” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

 

Ironically, Barrett is an “originalist,” who will rule only on what the Constitution says, and what the Founding Fathers said in 1787.

 

Being an “originalist” can be perplexing, because even the men who wrote the Constitution did not agree on what it meant. Sometimes they blazed away at each other in duels in order to determine whose interpretations were best.

 

We should also mention that none of the Founders had ever heard of insulin.

 

Or female judges.

 

So, can Congress pass a healthcare bill that tells insurance companies they can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions? For example, a 24-year-old with type-1 diabetes, who needs insulin to survive? Or a 61-year-old who has already suffered a stroke? It’s not the insurance company’s fault if you have a three-year-old, and your child develops leukemia! You should pay all the bills, yourself. Didn’t James Madison or Caleb Strong say that?

 

(That’s right, I said it: Caleb Strong, Founding Father, bitches.)

 

Barrett will now bring serious conservative chops to Supreme Court deliberations. For instance, she might support the kind of thinking that held that “freedom of speech” means billionaires can donate millions of dollars to candidates and political causes and get tax codes passed that save them hundreds of millions. I think the conservative majority in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee ruled that, “Money talks.” Therefore, political spending is free speech.

 

As Ben Franklin once said, “A penny saved is a penny earned, and if multiplied enough times will allow you to buy a U.S. senator.”

 

It might make perfect sense that a man of strict religious principles – a baker in Colorado – should not have to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. So ruled the Supreme Court in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. That decision rested on the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

 

Now, with another originalist on the high court, we can get back to ruling the way the Founding Fathers always wanted.

 

The new conservative majority may overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and stop the practice of gays and lesbians marrying, which is how Justice Clarence Thomas ruled, as part of the then-conservative minority in that 5-4 decision. Perhaps Thomas, another originalist, Barrett, and the other conservative justices could revisit Loving v. Virginia. There was a time when most states had laws banning interracial marriage. Then along came a bunch of liberal, “activist justices,” who ruled, 9-0, that a right to privacy existed, and states could not determine who you chose to marry. This is ironic, in Justice Thomas’s case, because he’s married to a white woman. It took a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1967 to overrule laws that would have banned his marriage.

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if we were guided only by the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, we’d still be ruling that African Americans were property, and Dred Scott, a slave who came before the court in 1857, had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

 

Ah, 1857! It was a time when America was great. In those days, if two slaves married their bond had no legal standing. A master could end their union by selling one or both, to different owners. If he kept the couple and they had children, the master could sell them instead. He could whip the husband if he protested and force himself upon the wife for sex.

 

Property rights were sacred, just as the Founding Fathers (10 of our first 12 presidents being slave owners) intended.

 

So, welcome Judge Barrett. We “look forward” to the day when rape victims have babies. And if those babies are born with serious health problems, mom can’t get insurance. And dad is a rapist.

 

Because you will have cast the deciding vote to kill the only law that ever protected people with pre-existing conditions.

 

Just as Caleb Strong always wanted.

The one, the only, Caleb Strong.