Robert Parry at Consortiumnews.org previews the upcoming Supreme Court case, where a corporation (the Hobby Lobby) is asserting freedom of religion in order to deny its employees access to birth control under the Affordable Care Act. He outlines the modus operandi of the five right-wingers on the Court thusly:
We’ll get a better sense of whether the Five – Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – will make their next leap of logic when the case gets to oral arguments. But whatever the Five do, you can count on them wrapping their reasoning in their claims to be devotees of an “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution or as “strict constructionists.”
The reality, though, is that the Five’s modus operandi is to reach an ideological conclusion about what they want to do based on their political opinions or partisan needs and then find some legal-sounding language to wrap around the ruling.
See, for instance, their reasoning for gutting the Voting Rights Act, despite the Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment explicitly authorizing Congress to take action it deems necessary to ensure the voting rights of racial minorities. Somehow the Five intuited an overpowering right of the states not to have their discriminatory behavior so constrained, all the better for Republicans and right-wingers to win elections.Parry provides a short history of right-wing revisionism when it comes to interpreting the Constitution, which generally involves arriving at a conclusion favorable to a conservative outcome, then cherry-picking and misinterpreting the intentions of the Founders to support the conclusion. Very good reading.
