The time is rapidly approaching when we are going to have to make a choice between two important absolutes.
On the one hand, individual freedom.
On the other, our constitution.
Whether it’s abortion rights, affirmative action, gay rights, campaign financing, student loan relief or all sorts of other things, the supermajority on the Supreme Court has been doing whatever possible to return the country to the distant past.
Of course, they insist they’re protecting freedom — the freedom of white, native-born, male fundamentalist Christians.
In other words, the people who have been running things for the entire life of this country.
I doubt I could come up with an accurate number, but it seems fairly obvious that white, native-born, male fundamentalist Christians are nowhere near a majority of the 330 million or so people in this country.
The Court says — reading between the lines — that those people should continue to be the ones running the country because that’s the way the old men who wrote the Constitution 234 years ago intended it. If there’s a tremendous irony in all this, it’s that reading the world of those men, they never intended their work to be eternal.
They wrote a constitution for a coastal nation of 3 million people, one in which nearly half of the states wanted to protect their right to chattel slavery. A nation in which only white men had the right to vote. They never dreamed their work would be seen as a secular version of the 10 commandments and would be used to govern a nation 110 times larger covering much of an entire continent.
In those days, there was at least a vague balance between the different states. Giving each of them two senators made some sense. But in modern-day America, a state like California with nearly 40 million people has two senators, while the eight smallest red states — Wyoming, Alaska, North and South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Idaho and Nebraska — have fewer than 10 million residents between them and have 16 senators.
Think about that. A resident of one of those states has 64 times the representation of someone in California.
The real irony is that’s the way individual state legislatures used to be. One house based on population, the other on geography, but the Supreme Court said that was wrong. Each person’s vote should count the same as any other person.
They called it one man, one vote.
Except for the U.S. Senate.
In the 2020 census, Wyoming had a population of 576,000, so each senator represented 288,000 people.
California had 39,538,000 people, so each senator represented 19,769,000 people.
That’s one reason issues that have the support of large majorities — like reasonable gun control — can’t become law, because the rural conservative states have far too much power.
Now we come to the crux of the problem.
With a far-right Supreme Court, the only real options are either to amend the Constitution or to call a convention to write a new constitution. Both solutions are flawed enough to be impossible.
Any proposed amendment must pass both houses of Congress by two-thirds majorities and then be ratified by 38 or the 50 states.
Two-thirds of state legislatures can propose amendments, although that has never been done.
But can you even imagine the smallest states going along with anything that would reduce their power in the government? There are more cows than people in red state Iowa, and the cows are no more eager to surrender power than Senator Joni Ernst.
So why wasn’t this always a problem?
People were more reasonable toward each other in the past, and people — for lack of a better term — were more willing to mind their own business.
We also didn’t have presidents who hated half the people in the country and played the other half off against them.
And most of all, we weren’t so damned stupid.
We’re going to have to do something about that.