Consistency

I am a landlord. This is not to suggest that I am some kind of a wealthy landowner with cash coming out of my pockets.. Last year, my wife and I purchased a duplex home, with the intent of renting out the upstairs apartment to reduce our costs.

It has been no picnic. Our first tenants, Avril Leslie (AKA "April Leslie," as if we don't know what Avril means in French) and Eric Ford (also known as Erie Ford) were our first tenants. Turns out they are professional scam artists, living off of one landlord after another by suing them for stuff that was not wrong with the apartment. They sued us for mold that was non-existent. The scam was to initiate a lawsuit and then they would not need to pay the landlord any rent. They did have to pay the Court, though and they were very careful to do that.

Then they get crazier and crazier, making the landlord worry about what must have happened to the apartment with them inside of it. But they didn't reckon with us. We informed them that they were in violation of the rules of the lease. We did everything very legally. They had signed a lease permitting one car in our driveway. We towed one. We noted that Avril has specifically applied for the apartment with the intention of moving her daughter in. Then she proceeded to take her daughter to school every day at a nearby town, which is theft of town services. We went over to that town's town hall and produced evidence they needed to expel her daughter. While I do not think they did that, life became a real struggle for Avril. We do not recommend to any landlord that he or she ever rent so much as a lean-to shed to them.

They moved out. But during this process, we were in court a lot and we watched the judge.

The judge tended to favor tenants and nail landlords. Landlords sell time. And the one thing one cannot get back is time. Once it passes, that's it. So rulings against landlords were particularly galling to us. But some won when a ruling had all ready been made by that self-same judge. You see, he was consistent.

Above every judge, there is an appeals court. Judges need to be consistent so that, if any case of theirs is appealed, they can justify their rulings as in keeping with a general thrust of judgements. These judgements, over time, wind up being how law is interpreted, especially in the appellate courts in a system called "English Common Law," or law by precedent.  This is distinguished from statutory law, which is generated as a bill by a legislature and signed by a chief executive and is complementary to it. This is to say that the two work together to create a structural framework for a country that fits the needs of the country as developed over time.

Here, we see our Supreme Court as in direct violation of the premise that common law needs to be complementary to statutory law. This is staggering. Every single Republican nominee to this court swore before the Senate of the United States in their hearings that they were not "activist judges," that they would interpret the laws and the Constitution and not make law from the bench.

Here, we see five Justices more than willing to write legislation in their decisions. The first one is, of course, the decision in Citizens United. According to Politifact, they did not "overturn 100 years of lawmaking to limit political contributions." I disagree. In his 1905 address to Congress, Theodore Roosevelt recommended that Congress act to restrain corporate contributions, The resultant Tillman Act was signed into law by Roosevelt on January 26, 1907. Congress has been trying to control corporate funding of elections since then.

Now, What is going on here is this reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which, in Section I states:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Now, at issue here is the word "persons." As a matter of interpretation of the word "person" in the Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. courts have extended certain constitutional protections to corporations. This allows them to get into contracts, to sue and be sued and to do all manner of things that real humans can do, once they are 21 or older.

And this particular Supreme court seems to think that, since they cannot vote, corporations ought to be able to spend way more money influencing politicians and our political process possibly can because they cannot.

I would like to think that one thing that government ought to do is to level the playing field between the super-rich and the poor, the corporations and the individual. Of course the right calls that "class warfare." I have read about "class warfare." It did happen, you know. In the French Revolution. Wealthy persons were dragged out of their homes and killed on the spot. Now that is class warfare. What the right is complaining about is how their special rights are being threatened just a little.

So let us get into this issue of special rights. In this last session, the Supreme Court has decided that "Closely-held Corporations," a term that the majority refused to define, have special rights to completely ignore US law. The only law they suggested that these corporations need to follow is tax law. They can discriminate against women and have all ready begun discriminating against persons whose gender preference offends the "closely held" owners. What's next? reversal of all civil rights for "closely-held corporations?"

So, now the Supreme Court has established a principle that corporations can exercise and promote religion. And they can do so without any respect to the rights of the persons who happen to have flesh and blood, skin and brains. You know, the ones that Thomas Paine was writing about in 1791. If I ever again hear anything that the right and the five activist right-wing Justices say about "the founders" again, my "BS" meter will be pegged. I let the reader discern what kind of barnyard smell the "BS" meter is designed to detect.

Three of the flesh and blood "persons" on the United States Supreme Court happen to be women. And I have to say that when Bush replaced the first female Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor with John G. Roberts, an opportunity to have four women on the Supreme Court was lost. O'Connor eventually allowed her feelings to be known about Bush's decision to keep the same number of women on the court. She thought Bush's choice to be disappointing. One can only imagine what might have happened with the Hobby Lobby decision had there been four women on the Supreme Court.

Alito agreed with the Majority opinion, but it is interesting to see his dissent in another case. in the 2011 decision Snyder v Phelps, to give Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps the First Amendment right to picket funerals of dead marines, the court ruled 8-1 in Phelps’ favor. Scalia dissented, saying "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case." He referred to Snyder as having been "brutalized" by Phelps. Then, right away, he ignored this decision in agreeing with a 5-4 majority decision to erase "buffer zones" around parental planning clinics which provide abortion services in McCullen v Coakley. I guess he thinks bombings, shootings of physicians and screaming at women entering these clinics is not brutalization.

Despite the presence of three women on this court, you should be afraid in the United States if you are a woman. Corporations have more rights than you. There is no consistency in law that protects women.