Let me be clear, training and education were reviled by Clarence Thomas Gives Bonkers Reason for SCOTUS to Tear Up Settled Laws (Daily Beast).
Justice Clarence Thomas is finding increasingly creative ways to justify reshaping long-standing laws.
During a rare appearance at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, the George H.W. Bush–appointed justice said the Supreme Court should take a more critical approach to settled precedent, arguing that decided cases are not “the gospel,” ABC News reported.
Thomas, 77, compared his Supreme Court colleagues to passengers on a train, and said: ”We never go to the front to see who’s driving the train, where is it going. And you could go up there in the engine room, find it’s an orangutan driving the train, but you want to follow that just because it’s a train.”
A court's legitimacy rests on being able to give a reasoned basis for its decision. The reasoning can be disputed, else there would be no employment for lawyers. Appellate courts determine whether a lower court's decision on the law (they don't do facts) is reasonable. If the issue is legislative, then the legislature can reform the law to fit better with the appellate court's decision - if the legislature disputes the appellate decision. If it is constitutional, there is the process for amending a constitution. It is difficult and most people whine about its difficulty, but that is the true process in our system - not jockeying in the Senate to get a Supreme Justice who will change the precedent.
Changes to precedent must be reasoned, not just a fiat of personal preferences. People, businesses, base their lives and businesses on precedent. We have seen the effects of such a fiat with the overruling of Roe v. Wade. No, it is not gospel, but you better be damned careful about overruling precedent.
What I sense in Clarence Thomas' speech is political violence hidden in a judicial opinion.
Class Action Suit Challenges Trump’s Unconstitutional Attack on Due Process (Common Dreams)
The ACLU of Massachusetts described the denial of bond hearings for ICE detainees as “a violation of statutory and constitutional rights” that are “upending decades of settled law and established practice in immigration proceedings.” The end result of this, the ACLU of Massachusetts warned, is that “thousands of people in Massachusetts will be denied due process.”
The complaint contends that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been denying ICE detainees their rights by “systematically reclassifying these people from the statutory authority of 8 U.S.C. § 1226, which usually allows for the opportunity to request bond during removal proceedings, to the no-bond detention provisions of 8 U.S.C. § 1225, which does not apply to people arrested in the interior of the United States and placed in removal proceedings.”
And if Clarence Thomas and his pals on the Supreme Court say the statute does mean what it is says, that Congress cannot provide due process in these statutes, then Trump wins. Our Trumpist Congress will not change the laws. The question becomes what about due process for the rest of us.
Eric Reinhart's What Is Political Violence? (Boston Review) discloses the violence in this sort of politics.
The selective and enforced outrage over Kirk’s murder reflects a fundamental truth: violence is never judged only on the basis of lives lost or individuals harmed. It is judged—and narrated—according to whether it sustains or threatens a particular social order. What counts as “violence,” and what counts as “order,” are always political determinations made by those in power. The fact that so many Democratic politicians and influential liberal commentators have rushed to parrot the Trump administration, without the slightest hesitation about the uses to which Kirk’s posthumous and state-sponsored sanctification is being put, underscores how little they grasp—or how insistently they deny—this most basic political truth. By uncritically accepting the Trump regime’s definition of “violence,” many Democrats are actively legitimizing and deepening the very authoritarian order they claim to oppose.
Reinhart cites other thinkers for his definition of political violence. I had never run across the ideas discussed, so let me quote them.
Georges Sorel, writing in 1908, gave a very different account of violence in his classic, Reflections on Violence. Violence is not simply an act, he argued, but a myth: a story through which societies interpret force, project meaning onto it, and either mobilize or demobilize political communities around it. A strike is not just a withdrawal of labor; it is a myth of collective uprising. A riot is not just chaos in the streets; it is a myth of insubordination that terrifies elites and inspires the oppressed. Violence matters less for its immediate effects than for the imaginative horizons it opens or closes. “Myths are not a descriptions of things,” Sorel writes, “but expressions of a will to act.”
***
Walter Benjamin sharpened this insight in his 1921 essay “Critique of Violence.” For Benjamin, a Jewish intellectual who would later take his own life as he anticipated deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, law itself is founded in violence—a primal conquest that inaugurates legal order. Once founded, law preserves itself through violence: police power, punishment, coercion. “Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence,” Benjamin writes, while “law-preserving violence” maintains a given power structure. What liberal societies call “peace” or “law and order,” then, is not the absence of violence but its routinization. Whether or not one shares Benjamin’s implicit vision—that in an ethical social order, law itself might wither away—he makes a crucial observation. Violence does not disappear when order is established; it becomes diffuse or even invisible through its law-preserving functions, no matter how unjust, arbitrary, and cruel the law may be.
If Sorel shows how violence becomes myth, and Benjamin shows how law conceals and perpetrates violence, Sigmund Freud helps explain why people cling so tightly to the most fundamental myth of every ruling order: that the operation of the law is always just. Psychoanalytically, the distinction between “order” and “violence” can function as a collective defense. It reassures us that our world—and the symbolic authority through which it coheres—is stable, that our aggression is justified, and that the cruelties carried out in the name of the law, in our name, are not really cruelties at all. In Freud’s terms, civilization builds and sustains itself through the repression and redirection of aggression. “Civilization . . . obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression,” he writes, “by weakening it, disarming it, and setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” To identify as civilized requires that this aggressiveness be dissimulated or concealed.
***
As is evident throughout U.S. history, the state has always depended on myths of violence to secure order and delegitimize dissent. After Reconstruction, white elites across the South fashioned the figure of the violent Black man to justify the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, the stripping of Black voting rights, the imposition of Jim Crow, and the eventual development of our still-growing, intensely racist U.S. policing system. The issue at play has never been about actual violence committed by Black communities; it was and remains about rendering Black freedom itself a threat to “order.”
The same logic animated the Red Scares of the twentieth century. Strikes, union drives, and antiracist organizing were routinely narrated as outbreaks of dangerous disorder requiring repression. COINTELPRO made this aim explicit, labeling groups from the Black Panthers to ministers like Martin Luther King Jr. as violent extremists whose mere organizing justified state surveillance, infiltration, and assassination. More recently, the bipartisan War on Terror inaugurated by George W. Bush, aggressively extended by Barack Obama, and now redoubled and repurposed under Trump, continues this tradition. The attacks of September 11 were turned into a narrative of perpetual looming threat that provided cover for torture, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, drone warfare with repeated mass murders of foreign civilians, and two decades of occupation abroad—all acts of overwhelming state violence that have never properly been counted as “violence” in official U.S. discourse.
But the characterization of criticism being equal to violence only amplified following Wednesday’s shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas, which killed one detainee and critically injured two others. JD Vance made a similar suggestion that critical rhetoric toward ICE was to blame for the attack.
“When Democrats like Gavin Newsom ... say that these people [ICE] are part of an authoritarian government, when the left-wing media lies about what they’re doing, when they lie about who they’re arresting, when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement... What they’re doing is encouraging crazy people to go and commit violence,” said Vance.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), likewise, blamed the shooting on “every politician who is using rhetoric demonizing ICE and demonizing [Customs and Border Protection].”
Miller’s comments, which directly refer to criticism of the Trump administration as “inciting violence and terrorism,” may be the most direct indication yet of an intent to criminalize First Amendment-protected dissent.
Ironically, these threats have only made criticisms of Trump as an authoritarian grow louder.
The Democrats must then impeach and remove Clarence Thomas and more of the Supreme Court Justices.
If you do not like this news because it exposes the incipient autocracy you want, then be sure you can stomach what you will get for your efforts.
sch 9/28
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