A comment I thought deserved repeating

Chris Geidner at Law Dork, whose writings at Substack and his own site I heartily recommend, just wrote about two recent Circuit Court decisions.

One was out of the 6th Circuit that dismissed a challenge to a Tennessee anti-drag law; in the other the 5th Circuit upheld Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting imposed on people with felony convictions for any of a variety of crimes.

I was moved to make a comment that I thought worthy of repeating here. To fully get the first couple of paragraphs you should read the relevant piece since they refer to the decisions he was analyzing, but I don’t think that’s truly necessary to grasp the point I was really trying to get to.

Any way, this is what I wrote:

"Mathis’s dissenting opinion ... made a strong argument on the merits."

Unfortunately, that's just not good enough these days, not when we have fanatic judges ruling in effect that you can't challenge a law unless you prove you are breaking it and if you do, that just proves you're guilty because the law is valid - a ruling better expressed as "heads I win, tails you lose."

Not when we have judges with hang-ups about sex and sexuality deep enough to rule that, among other things, even drag shows and go-go dancers ("Go-go dancers?" Really??) are inherently "harmful to minors."

Not when we have judges finding the phrase "could be" seen by a minor - not "would be" or "would likely be" or "could reasonably be expected to be," but merely "could be"- is NOT unconstitutionally vague and does NOT positively invite discriminatory enforcement.

Not when we have judges who employ the sneering, condescending dismissal of (paraphrasing slightly) "go and do the hard work of convincing state legislatures" literally at the same time as you tell them that the main method of bringing political pressure - the vote - is denied them.

What we are seeing, especially in that last example, is the emergence of what Viktor Orban dubbed "illiberal democracy," otherwise known as "the tyranny of the majority" - meaning "We are the majority so we'll do whatever we flipping well want. You don't like it? TS. You may think you have rights, but remember that we interpret what they mean."

They are not, in fact, the majority, but enough of us are sufficiently disengaged or discouraged or disinformed that they have positions of power that enable them to act as if they are and use those positions to further entrench themselves and their warped ideology.

We face hard times and I confess I have a combination of short-term despair and long-term hope. But I also think we have to be prepared to be aggressive with more than words and frankly with more than voting. I don't mean violence, I don't mean rioting, acting like we were a bunch of right-wingers - but I do mean being in the streets, being visible, including mass civil disobedience.

But I'll end this screed on a moment of hope. The reason the right wing is trying so hard, pulling every trick, grabbing and pulling on every lever of power they can find, is because they know that in the long run of history they are going to lose and like King Canute in the popular version of the story, they are trying to hold back the tide. Like him, they will fail. It's up to us to determine how long that will take.

Reactions, as always, are welcome.