We...the People?

     Agree or not, that phrase "We, the people" --once so instrumental in the founding of our government-- has become a shell of itself.  One could almost argue that even the words "these United States" have weakened since our states now seem to be far from "united."  Trying to define "the people"  --not only here but pretty much for any country-- is now almost an impossibility.  Those are not MY people, or that's not what "people" really think.  Just as the Supreme Court ignored the high percentage of what the "people" wanted, so too have our presidential elections through the decades (I should note that 5 Republican Presidents lost the popular vote but were elected anyway).  And no, this is not about conspiracies or false results, even if 139 Congressional representatives refused to acknowledge the results of the recent election (what??), perhaps afraid of whatever, or perhaps actually echoing a lost trust in our legal system.  And who knows, if our politicians and courts are losing faith, could "we, the people" be far behind?   But whatever side of the political or religious fence you're on, one point still seems to be clear: the cowardly shooting and killing of innocent women and children in schools and parades and hospitals is not the will of the people.

Graph from Statista

      I've written about this many times, as have many others, but now Congress and the courts are upholding laws that continue to give access to 18-year olds (the rooftop shooter in Highland Park who fired 70 rounds at children and others had just turned 18 days before).   My own state is little different from many others as we have one of the highest concealed weapon ownership rates due to no longer needing to undergo training or apply for a permit.  But a quick glance at a map of the U.S. (from last year) shows that our state is far from alone.  Said the conservative online site, The Hill: In a report Third Way recently released, we found that murder was much more prevalent in red states than blue states.  That’s right. In 2020, homicide rates were a stunning 40 percent higher in the 25 states that former President Donald Trump won compared to the 25 won by current President Joe Biden.  Of the 10 states with the highest 2020 per capita murder rates in America, eight of them not only voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, they voted Republican in every presidential election this century.  Even California Governor Gavin Newson asked what exactly was going (this on Trump's faltering media start, Truth Social).  And to break your heart even further, People Magazine detailed all the photos of the nineteen 10-year olds and the 2 teachers killed in Uvalde.  Even TIME  reported, "we, the people" now have had a mass shooting (4 or more people killed) every single day so far this year, their cover simply saying "enough.". But apparently it wasn't enough to sway the Supreme Court justices...

     The New Yorker was a bit harsher in its criticism: Two years ago, a study published in the journal Justice Quarterly examined the effects of gun laws in every state.  Emma Fridel, an assistant professor of criminology at Florida State University, looked at gun-ownership rates and the proliferation of concealed-carry laws between 1991 and 2016.  State lawmakers pushing for laxer laws have tended to argue that a more broadly armed public would serve as a deterrent to violence.  Fridel found the opposite: gun-homicide rates in states with more permissive carry policies were eleven per cent higher than in states with stricter laws, and the probability of mass shootings increased by roughly fifty-three per cent in states with more gun ownership.  The most obvious indicator of the absurdist thinking on this subject can be seen in the fact that the latest massacre happened in Texas, a state that has more than eight thousand gun dealers, and where an estimated thirty-seven per cent of the population owns firearms.  Last year, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that allowed most Texans to carry handguns without a license or mandatory training.  This legislation did not prevent the Uvalde carnage any more than previous legislation allowing easier access to guns prevented the 2019 shooting that killed twenty-three people at an El Paso Walmart, or the 2017 attack in the town of Sutherland Springs, which took the lives of twenty-six worshippers in a rural church...The circumstances that make a mass murder of fourth graders possible are inherently political.  The legal access to the weaponry involved is political.  The most visible people refusing to see these things as political happen to be elected to political office...Some of this is on Second Amendment fundamentalists and the politicians who translate their zealotry into law—the rest is on every one of us who has yet to find the courage, the creativity, or the resolve to stop it. 

     So why would the Supreme Court, in a response to let states have more control over gerrymandering and women's bodies, decide NOT to let states decide their own gun control laws?  Wouldn't they follow stare decisis, a centuries-old (as The Week put it): ...legal principle stating that judges should defer to past interpretations of statutes and the Constitution...periodically throughout U.S. history --about 232 times, to be precise-- justices have disregarded stare decisis and overruled their predecessors...Alito insists that overturning Roe does not threaten "precedents that do not concern abortion," but his assurance is hardly binding.  Two years ago, he and (Clarence) Thomas complained in an opinion that the court had created "a novel constitutional right" in same-sex marriage that is "ruinous" to "religious liberty."  The court, they said, "has created a problem that only it can fix."  So what happens if this Supreme Court, one of the world's smallest constitutional courts with only 9 justices, decides that states --and not the federal government-- can send who they like as electors, even if it contradicts the votes of "we, the people."  Here's how The Guardian explained the upcoming case: Ordinarily, we think of federal governments versus state governments.  Some powers are federal and some powers are state.  But this is an idea that within the state government, the federal constitution somehow specifies which branch of state government should be calling the shots.  If it’s the legislature, that means in theory the governor has no role.  The courts have no role.  The people acting directly through direct democracy referenda and initiative, they would have no role.  And perhaps most importantly, the courts have no role in enforcing the state constitution.

     Thomas K. Knapp, publisher of Rational Review, wrote an op-ed in my local paper (The City Weekly) which elaborated a bit on this legal morass: On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.  Not unexpectedly (due to a leak of associate justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion in early May), the ruling overturns decades of precedent established in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), largely leaving the question of if (and if so, how) abortion can be regulated to state legislatures... Constitutionally, that argument often takes the form of claims for "states' rights," which is, itself, a misnomer.  Constitutionally, states don't have "rights," they have powers.  See, for example, the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." ...Decentralization is the notion that decisions should be made at the "lowest" possible level of government.  Don't let Congress decide if a state legislature can decide; don't let a state legislature decide if a county commission can decide; don't let a county commission decide if a city council can decide; don't let a city council decide if individuals can decide...With Roe, decisions concerning abortion were largely decentralized to the lowest possible level, that of individual choice.  Agree with the logic of the decision or not, that was its effect.  But per Dobbs, such decisions are now largely centralized into the hands of state legislatures.

      Down the road could be decisions by the Supreme Court on inter-racial marriage as well as same-sex marriage, and on states altering elections as well as women having sex, consensual or not.  Said William Falk, editor of The Week: ...to dramatically reduce abortion, this Prohibition must stop women from having unwanted pregnancies -- which means stopping them from having sex.  That is indeed the goal of many evangelicals and Catholics in the right-to-life movement, who believe that the only legitimate sexual expression is between a married heterosexual couple not using birth control.  All else is sin.  In National Review, pro-life campaigner Alexandra Desanctis helpfully explains that in the view of the movement (and that of five Supreme Court justices), no woman will be "forced to give birth."   That's because there is no "fundamental right" to have "sex without consequences," Desanctis says.  Once a (bad) woman has sex, she has surrendered her choice. The past is the future.

     So how did we get here, where Congress seems to be as split as the nation, and where the courts seem to be going against the wishes of a majority of the population?  Anne Applebaum asked a similar question two years ago in The Atlantic: ...It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems.  The process usually begins slowly, with small changes.  Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.  This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change.  Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.  

     Unbeknownst to many, the final report by the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court was released to almost a blank audience.  Said Linda Greenhouse in The New York Review of Books: Media attention was sparse, reflecting the initial cynicism and giving the public little reason to care what the experts had to say about any of the proposals they reviewed.  The bi-partisan group of 34 "mostly law professors" came up with a heavily-footnoted 288 page report:  What shines through the testimony presented by younger scholars at the commission’s public hearings is how little idealism remains, or at least how little of it has been embraced by a generation for which the Warren Court exists only in books.  The Supreme Court in retrenchment, in thrall to the mid-twentieth-century’s invented construct of “originalism” as the key to the meaning of the Constitution, has been the overriding fact of their professional lives.  (Along with the report itself, the testimony is posted on a dedicated White House website.)  Taken as a whole, the commission’s work lets the public in on the fact that the legal academy is close to giving up on the Supreme Court.  Not that this development could have remained a secret for much longer: as the spring semester began, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at Berkeley, and Jeffrey Abramson, a professor of law and government at the University of Texas, captured the mood with an anguished question: “What do we teach law students when we have no faith in the Supreme Court?”  

     The positions of the Supreme Court have swung as wildly as our country's mood over the past few centuries.  Charging mobs in to the Capitol may look fine to some and seditious to others; but what if things had happened so slowly --states overrode the votes of the people and courts upheld their decisions-- that an even larger revolution took place?  James Meek pondered this in the London Review of Books as he reviewed a book by Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: ...it’s one thing to imagine, as Walter encourages her readers to do, the gradual spread of white supremacist, anti-government terrorism across America against a democratic framework, until one day the progressive left, and the people of colour she suggests are likely to be targets of violence, arm and organise for self-protection.  It’s another to wake up one morning and find that without any bloodshed or violence, without any seeming change in the smooth running of traffic signals and ATMs and supermarkets, without, even, an immediate wave of arrests or a clampdown on free speech, your country is run by somebody who took power illegally.  Something must be done!  But what, apart from venting on social media?  And by whom?  Me?  In Ukraine, students and the liberal middle class found fighting allies among football ultras, small farmers and extreme nationalists.  Such an alliance would be hard to pull together in the Euro-American world...Watching the Capitol riot a year and a bit later, the pro-lie votes of the pro-Trump Republicans were more troubling than the conduct of the rioters.  The protesters were deluded; many seemed to have been driven over the edge of sanity by Trump and other forms of internet-borne conspiracism.  There was a lot of malice, aggression, hate, bitterness and ignorance in the mob.  There was also a wasted sincerity, ruthlessness and will.  Who, I wondered, would do for the truth what these people were ready to do for a lie?  Our state continues to be in a severe drought*...our governor has asked his followers to pray for rain (seriously).  Do we trust this person or people in his legislature to determine how we vote?

The "great" Salt Lake in 1987 and 2020; photo: Google Earth

     Activist and winner of the Gandhi Peace Award, Bill McKibben is upset as well.  In his book, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, McKibben (now in his 60s) wrote: I'd like to keep trying; in fact, I'd like to win some of these fights.  And I think that one group that could help make that possible are my fellow Americans who also aren't so young anymore, the boomers and the silent generation above them...I think it's at least possible that a significant portion of this demographic is ready to act differently.  Remember: the first act of these lives was fascinating.  We participated in or at least bore witness to the last period of broad cultural and social change, to the civil rights and antiwar and women's movements.  We saw the justice window open, and then we saw it close.  The second act of our lives was, to again speak in generalities, more privatized -- more focused on individual accomplishment, often to the detriment of the larger world.  We were better consumers than citizens.  But many of us are now emerging into our latter years with skills, with more than our share of resources, and with grandchildren.  Surely that might give us the capacity and the reason to help.  Not to lead: the leaders of the work for change are younger people, who have risen to the occasion.  But they need backing; they need our third act to improve on the second.  In the end, Mckibben asks us to get back our flag, to again become "we the people."  I've always been both amazed and chagrined that many progressives willingly surrendered the flag to the Right...why should the stars and stripes belong to men who believed in individualism over community, who were building new empires as oppressive as anything the British had constructed? (here he was referring to the initial Revolution and our fight for independence from Britain)  Didn't it make more sense, as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War had recognized, to claim that symbol as sacred, and to insist that it undercut the powers that be? 

     Some final rants: I happened to pick up a copy of the lavishly-illustrated photo book by James Lagomarsino, Native Americans.  Perhaps it was because I had so callously passed through ancient Nez Percé lands (see last post), but then who knew that Iowa, Alabama, Delaware, Illinois, Ottawa, Biloxi, Spokane and Biloxi were all Native American populations.  One could say that at one point, these massive migrations (at least four are accepted) of different groups in North America could claim that they were the first "people" in the United States.  But then one has to factor in this, wrote Lagomarsino: Although many of the native tribes were friendly to the European explorers, the first group that Columbus met were the Arawaks on Haiti.  Most of the 250,000 members of the tribe were violently enslaved; within  a hundred years, there were only 500 left, and within a few decades the entire culture was extinct.  This was the most drastic example of European behaviour, however, over the next 400 years many other native cultures in the Americas were eradicated or altered beyond all recognition...As more and more Europeans arrived, the pressure for living space grew.  It was not long before tribes were being displaced, and this often ended in physical confrontation....In the end though, the native Indians were doomed to lose -- they were outnumbered, outgunned and unable to unite against the enemy.

     Our courts' position as well as our political position may be once again shifting, a giant pendulum making its umpteenth swing back in the other direction.  But shooting children is something I hope we will never find acceptable, nor would be trying to overthrow the will of the people by illegal means.  The recent ads by Sandy Hook Promise have this note on their site: Remember: Every Positive Action Creates Impact.  Over 8,315,504 people have joined their cause.  8+ million of "we, the People."  Learn the issues, learn the reasons, learn what you can, or are willing to do.  As native Kentuckian author and historian Emily Bingham intimated: Ignorance...is not an option for the patriotic.  "So little is required to destroy a mind," said Adrian Woolfson in The Wall Street Journal.  Perhaps we all should pause and look up and see just where we are.  Without signs and without roads, there are no borders that divide us.  Sometimes we forget that "we" encompasses all of us...We, the People.

London’s Royal Observatory Greenwich Astronomy
 Photographer of the Year competition:: Oregon Coast by Marcin Zając

*In an article in Bloomberg, our state's drought condition was described this way: A state audit in 2015 found that Utah has the highest water use in the US, at 248 gallons per capita, and Salt Lake City charges less for water than all but one of the 30 major US cities surveyed, including desert cities such as Phoenix (which charges 30% more), Las Vegas (36% more), and Santa Fe (82% more).  Some local regulations encouraged heavy water consumption, like the city ordinance that required 50% of yards to be covered with “turf, perennial or low growing shrub vegetation”-- a figure that has since been reduced to 33%...Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer J. Cox, has resisted calls for measures such as a construction moratorium.  “We’ve always been in a dry state, and we’ve had very positive economic development,” Cox said at a press conference in May.  “We are in a drought cycle right now.  I don’t anticipate that the drought cycle will last forever.  I don’t know if it will last one more year or five more years or 10 more years.”