No Justice

 This week Amy Coney Barrett almost silently walked us through the complicated and tedious work of her jurisprudence as she seeks a position on the highest court of the land. While she explained how she applies a history scholar's forensic understanding of the Constitution to justify the alignment of contemporary laws, not only with the framers' intentions in mind but also the understanding of the 18th-century populace; I had an epiphany:

Originalism is racist hogwash.

A close read of words to divine 18th-century reasoning for the defense or discrediting of any particular law seems just about as helpful to modern life and communication as speaking in tongues.

Nothing more.

Ultra-educated people examining words from the public record with such surgical precision, and yet not seeming to notice the absence of opinions from those who were disfranchised from the start of this century's long experiment: The native people who were here first. People who had been enslaved and later called 3/5ths human. Women. 

History, as we have been told so often, is written by the winners. 

But who wins? What do they get?

Let's face facts: a conservative majority court is a win for some American enterprise and a loss for a more perfect union.

When they succeed in gutting protections for the vulnerable and take away a woman's right to body autonomy, when they let the polluters dump more waste into our skies and our rivers, and when they install one corrupt leader after another, what will be left of democracy?

And if anything solidified my new understanding, it was the exchange of "sarcasm" between Lindsey Graham and Barrett when he asked if she had any knowledge of any desire to go back to the "good old days of segregation."

Barrett, who is raising two Black children, said "no," with neither hesitation nor derision at such an ugly glibness.

There will always be winners and losers. 

Barrett, the law professor, explained how discrimination, as a concept, is a necessary endeavor of law.

She wants us to take for granted that she is unbiased despite all her writing and advocacy to the contrary. She wants us to be reassured that she always takes the loser's thoughts into account as she renders her decision, just like she would anyone of her children when she's taken away their heart's desire for the greater good.

It's a shame that a woman's right to choose her path in her own life is one of the shiny objects Barrett desires to snatch away in her goal of parenting of a nation.

Not that she sees it that way.

I'd like to think Amy Barrett and the people who believe in her brand of conservative domination will not prevail. I'd like to think that a body that believes itself to be just will understand that the right to self-determination for all people is no less worthy of defending and upholding without discrimination.

But I cannot pretend under our current and unprecedented circumstances with open corruption, ineptitude, and malevolence in this administration, that this president's pick for a lifetime appointment to the bench will redeem an embattled court or preserve our sullied democracy.

Just the opposite.