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Column By John Young
Here’s the deal: They might be out there right now, little green men, fueling up a saucer armada for the takeover of us.
The odds of them being out there are on their side. This universe has too many incubating places for us to be alone. Who’s to protect us?
Well, of course, right-wingers on today’s Supreme Court.
Thomas. Alito. Kavanaugh. Gorsuch. Barrett. Roberts.
They’re here to run things. You don’t think green beings are a threat? They’ll be the judges of that.
The thing is, with this court, we don’t need an actual threat. We just need imagined threats.
So in the court’s next session, we can expect the court to legalize martial law in advance of any Martians.
Sure, we’ve managed to fend off an ET invasion for more than 200 years, but the precedent is a moot matter now. So are concepts like “legal standing” and the presumption that right-wing plaintiffs won’t just make stuff up.
That assumption was thrown out the door when the court invalidated Colorado’s law forbidding businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ individuals.
The plaintiff is a “website developer” who hasn’t developed any websites. Curious. She says a gay man put her on the spot to do a wedding site, except the gay man in question isn’t gay but straight and married with children. Curiouser.
Flimsy, too. With a decision that effectively neuters equal protection for people based on their sexual orientation, this court has shown it will rule on what former deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal calls “imaginary cases.”
We shall award the court’s controlling right-wing clan a cartoon-comics name based on this superpower: the Hypotheticals. Red tights, Spandex masks, and elbow-length gloves all around.
As another “for instance”: Justice Roberts was way up in the hypothetical clouds when saying Joe Biden exceeded his power in relieving millions of young Americans of college debt without involving Congress.
Curious. That the same court did nothing when Donald Trump exceeded his power and spent billions on a border wall that’s mostly holes.
But let’s talk about the imaginary case made by red states to win the Hypotheticals’ attention on this college debt matter.
The case made was that the state of Missouri would be harmed because a state lending agency – Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) – would be harmed.
That was a truly specious claim. Under the proposal, the lender would receive $61 million – more than Missouri said it would lose – in fees to process forgiveness.
More pertinently, MOHELA wasn’t even a plaintiff. The plaintiffs were red-state ideologues serving as attorneys general.
Comparing what the court did to Biden’s plan and what it didn’t do to Trump’s wall-building plan tells us everything about the politics driving the Hypotheticals.
This is a menace at many levels in our increasingly tainted court system.
Consider the case that brought the nation to within inches of a ban on mifepristone, one of two key chemical components used to end a pregnancy early and safely.
Right-wing entities shopped around for a one-judge federal district in Amarillo in which the not-quite Honorable Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk deemed himself qualified to suspend the use of the drug despite Food and Drug Administration authorization dating back to 2000.
The drug has been used safely in over half of the abortions in America since then. Yet Kacsmaryk, a former Christian legal activist, granted standing to a small group of physicians based on the almost nil possibility that the drug might cause harm to one of their patients.
Well, you know, Judge, green men might come one of these days, and what will we do? The president can’t get a filibustering minority in the Senate and a razor-thin GOP majority in the House to do anything about it.
We turn to you, the Hypotheticals.
What do you think? States and sanctuary cities run by the Democrats will roll out the welcome mat for green beings.
Give totalitarian red states the power of martial law so they don’t have to limit the imposition of bodily control on constituents with wombs.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
