Day 115: Florida Freedom Summer of 2024: How do you tell folks who  have just been given medication providing positive daily relief from a lifetime of aches and pains that they have an inoperable tumor?

Now as most of you know, I am no physician, or psychologist,  and I have never had any training in either field.  But I pride myself on being an attorney who some regard as the father of the concept of the right to refuse treatment  That concept was upheld in two landmark decisions in Michigan in 1973-74, by a three judge state court, barring use of human subjects for a research project which would subject them to experimental surgery, and separately by a three-judge federal court, declaring numerous violations of constitutional rights in the state’s Mental Health Code.

We continue to live in an era in which doctors think they know best and more about our individual health than we ourselves can learn on the internet, and adapt to fit our own bodies.

As for knowledge about our minds or hormonal effects, and attempts to cure everything from hysteria to homosexuality, well, by now we know how silly those attempts were, don’t we?

Don’t get me wrong.  I am certainly appreciative that the field of medicine has been receptive to marvelous breakthroughs in my lifetime which I am sure have contributed to my still being here in my 80’s.  

But I am acutely aware of the field’s limits and the unfortunate frequent habit of misleading us when in fact the physicians don’t have the answers or they perceive us as children who aren't really able to understand bad news.

One reason I believe the extreme political right surfaced during the pandemic, which may or may not be over, is that there was, and is, a reluctance to truly admit how much doctors really don’t know, e.g., how bad the flu season really will be or how to distinguish between symptoms of colds, influenza, COVID-19, or some new viruses, or the need to maintain social isolation.

That said, I certainly would trust the recommendations of physicians more than those of lawyers, judges, or justices who think they know more about health care than their medical counterparts. Seemingly forgotten in this post Roe v. Wade era is the fact that the original judicial decision specifically left the issues related to pregnancies up to doctors. Indeed, some women were known to gripe that the decision which lasted nearly 50 years didn’t give them full control over their own bodies.  Physicians had to agree with the requests of the women, before anything could be done.

Personally, I don’t handle myself well with doctors.  This year, I am not going through the annual check-up the VA provides for me, because my primary care physician has been changed, and I am not willing to expose my 87-year-old body and its levels of oxygen,  cholesterol,  sugar, and the limits of my constricted blood circulation,  to interpretation by someone I have no reason to trust.   Indeed, knowing me I could get very angry.

I do have a shrink to talk to me about anger management, and I certainly rely on both VA audiology and ophthalmology clinics, because both my ears and my eyes do not function properly, and the hearing aids and glasses I am prescribed seem to have shortcomings from time to time.

If you haven’t realized by now, I am procrastinating, because I find myself with professional knowledge of a longtime destructive force in our political system which has surfaced in the middle of a wonderful unexpected outcome in the mid-term election.  This stream of consciousness was triggered by a headline in the Washington Post which suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court had traded its rejection of Roe v. Wade for U.,S, House seats.

The writer probably is right that the Republicans would have done much better, and perhaps even benefited  from the wrongly predicted GOP tsunami but for that horrendous decision. Young people particularly have counted on the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies during the modern era and apparently voted overwhelmingly for Democrats who regarded the right to abortions as a primary topic in the mid-term elections. 

The Republican party rightly took the hit, but know that they have prevailed in the long run on that issue, because of the opinion of six conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who disregarded precedent.

Now we’re coming to it.  Don’t rush me.  Okay.  I will say it.

People in this nation, directly or indirectly, no longer have a  judiciary, on the federal level, to balance the executive and legislative branches..  What few outside the legal profession recognize is that since the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s, Republican presidents and state GOP politicians have been appointing judges whose beliefs agree with the party’s white supremacist pseudo-Christian ideology.

We’re not just writing about the selection of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, but lower court trial and appeal judges as well.  The legal tumor is called the Federalist Society, which is causing this Republic headache to democracy.  The group was started by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago Law Schools in 1982, and their conservative ideas were spread rapidly throughout the nation, especially after the U.S. Senate rejected the proposed appointment of reactionary Yale Law Professor Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987.

Republicans in the U.S. Senate have made it their business not only to nominate and appoint justices and judges recommended by the Society but they have worked to prevent Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and especially Barack Obama from getting their proposed judges or justice on the benches during their terms in office.

The politicizing of the judiciary became evident in the legal wrangling in both the federal and state judiciaries in Florida during the G. W. Bush/Al Gore election controversy in 2000. 

U.S. constitution and legal precedent suggested that the Florida Supreme Court would be the final arbiter of the vote count.  But five justices ruled that the Republican secretary of state’s prior endorsement of the vote count in favor of George W. Bush should stand, rather than allow the predominantly Democratic state high court to have the final say.  And so Bush was chosen. 

Justice John Paul Stevens with agreement of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer, wrote that he believed the court’s holding displayed “an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed.”

He continued, “The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

Bush in his presidency openly rejected the input and evaluations of judicial candidates by the American Bar Association.  By the time Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the Federalists Society was the organization vetting prospective candidates for the president.

This week, reactionary Chief Judge William Pryor of the reactionary U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit (Florida, Georgia, Alabama) spoke to the organization and called the growth of the conservative Federalist Society an "example of the American dream" and mocked criticism by a U.S. senator and others who say the influential legal group has captured the judiciary.

Three decisions published in the popular press this week  reveal the slant of conservative federal and states judges. The releases are attached with the report on the Judge Pryor’s speech, but you don’t have to read beyond the headlines about them to get their Republican drift:

Judge strikes down Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan

Judge halts pot dispensary licenses in parts of New York

 

U.S. judge rejects Biden administration's LGBT health protections

 

Gabriel Hillel, for Florida Freedom Summer of 2024