Court Limits
There are no easy answers or quick fixes now. Each passing day it is clear that the institutions and shared practices that many of us called upon to make our world a little better are no longer capable of providing solutions. Instead, they are supporting the brutality required to protect the property and privilege of the few.
Consider the courts. Over the last few weeks we have seen police officers set free in spite of clear evidence they shot people to death without cause. It took uprisings, organizing, and courageous prosecutors to even bring police officers to trial for killing African Americans in plain sight. In every case, there was overwhelming visual evidence that these individuals posed no threat or made any aggressive actions. Yet juries decided cops were justified in shooting people to death out of fear for their own lives.
We are also witnessing the transformation of the Supreme Court. Already dominated by right-wing, conservative views, we now have a court backing power and corporate privilege. Its recent decision to uphold the President’s executive order restricting immigration was all the administration needed to move forward with discriminatory, senseless, and brutal restrictions, targeting Muslims.
Courts have always been unreliable avenues for justice. The Supreme Court does not recognize the sanctity of human life. Historically it has placed property over people. In the Dred Scott case, it defended slavery by defining human beings as property. Within a few short years, it began defining corporations as people.
Over the last decade, the Court has extended this doctrine of corporate personhood. While individual protests are limited, corporations are granted free speech to spend unlimited money in support of federal, state, or local candidates. While Muslims are targeted, corporations are granted freedom of religion and the right to refuse to comply with federal mandates.
In the early years of the republic, the only right given to corporations was the right to have their contracts respected by the government. But the Civil War changed all that. As the industry advanced and railroads spread, corporations needed ways to raise money and protect themselves from liabilities. As Columbia University professor Eben Moglen explains, the adoption of the 14th Amendment was a corporate boon.
"From the moment the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, lawyers for corporations — particularly railroad companies — wanted to use that 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection to make sure that the states didn't unequally treat corporations."
This provided the basis for the expansion of the idea that came to fruition in Citizen’s United where a divided Court decided 5-4 in 2010 to extend full First Amendment rights to corporations. For the first time, corporations are able to spend as much money as they wish on candidates for public office.
During the height of the bankruptcy trials in Detroit, we learned that courts are no friends of justice. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes said he had no power to protect people from irreparable harm from massive water shut-offs in spite of agreeing that many people would suffer. He said financial interests have to be protected. There was no law guaranteeing a right to water.
There was a law guaranteeing the right to a pension. In fact, pensions were explicitly protected in the Constitution of the State of Michigan. The judge, however, said that the law didn’t matter. Thus 80% of the Detroit Bankruptcy cost was borne by pensioners.
Further, we learned that Free speech did not include imaginative public art and courageous acts of civil disobedience. These would be punished as harshly as possible, threatening people with prison and twisting laws to avoid even the possibility of basic justice.
We need to insist on basic human rights in the court system, but we should have no illusions about the real work ahead of us in creating new systems of just relationships that protect people and respect the earth.