Independence Day
Independence Day 2022 comes in the midst of a complex national crisis. The most recent decisions by the Supreme Court reveal that the “ultimate authority” in the land is completely out of touch with the lives of the majority of the people. The Court is taking us back to the vision of the perfect world imagined by right wing ideologues, the pre-civil war south.
This is not the first time the Court has pulled us backwards. It made the same effort immediately following Reconstruction. Most notable was the infamous decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1896. This paved the way for the undermining of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and for the establishment of the Jim Crow South. It took more than 70 years, countless deaths and diminishments of humanity before the Civil Rights struggles established the right to vote and congress passed a new Voting Rights Act.
That effort, too, has been undermined by the courts. The court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder removing the ability of the Justice Department to limit race based gerrymandering. Then in Rucho v. Common Cause, the court eliminated the role of federal courts to review discriminatory state practices.
Abdicating protect of voting rights was coupled with endorsing mass murders of African Americans. Protecting the KKK in the 1873 massacre in Colfax, Louisiana , the Supreme Court gave the green light to domestic terrorists.
We face a reality today where “the instruments of racial oppression developed in the South continue to be employed today. Like wealthy slaveholders and their apologists, members of the far right today—and this includes a large majority of the Republican Party—share methods, language, and values that promote undemocratic results. They condemn the supposed tyranny of the federal government and feel themselves to be its innocent victims. As part of their plan to pursue small government and privatize enormous parts of public services, which the wealthiest among them will buy, control, and profit from, they attack public education, and attempt to deprive working people of retirement benefits, unions, healthcare, and safety and environmental protections.
Today’s Supreme Court has withdrawn from public scrutiny. The New York Times Morning Briefing on July 3 noted, “not long after the leak in early May of a draft of the opinion that overruled Roe v. Wade, the courthouse was surrounded by an eight-foot fence. Always cloistered and remote, the court is now impenetrable.”
This Independence Day we need to consider the key progressive ideals in the national declaration. The first, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and the second, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
In 1776 these were revolutionary ideas, that all human beings had inalienable rights and that the purpose of governments was to protect and promote them. Governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the people.
In 2022, we are living with governments at every level that are failing in these most basic ideas. The Declaration offers a solution we need to think about, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”