Supreme Court Judgments Undermine the US as a Nation
by John Lawrence
So Harvard can't admit students based on race but can admit legacy student based on the fact that their parents gave money to Harvard. First of all Harvard is a private institution. Why can't it decide for itself how to admit students based on policies of their own making. Why is the government telling Harvard how to admit students. Harvard as a private entity within the United States is entitled to its own freedom without government interference as dictated by the Supreme Court. This conservative Supreme Court will not hesitate to tell government to get out of the affairs of private individuals as it did in the case of the web designer who didn't want to design web sites for gays. Yet it wants to dictate to Harvard what its admission policies should be. If I started a college and wanted to admit only blacks, I suppose the Supreme Court would have an issue with that, but then isn't my admission policy free speech? It seems that everything else is. Whatever anyone wants to do, providing the Supreme Court agrees with it, it declares that that is free speech. The principle is that it doesn't want the government to set any policies at all. According to their philosophy government should be policy neutral. Government should just set a level playing field and then get out of everyone's business. But in the Harvard case they declared just the opposite should hold. The government should be in the business of setting admission policies according to the Supreme Court.
According to conservative philosophy by which the Supreme Court is dominated, the Federal government should have no role in public policy whatsoever. So one of the techniques it uses is to refer everything back to the states. The states should set all policies, not the Federal government. So if a state wants to ban books, it has a perfect right to do so. If a state wants to ban trans males from female sports or bathrooms, its has a right to do so. But of course the Federal government has no right to weigh in on one side or the other. This is the philosophy for overturning Roe vs Wade. Each state should set its own abortion policy. The Federal government does not have a right to set this or any other policy for the country as a whole. Presumably the Supreme Court at some point will also weigh in on the illegality of the Federal government setting policies on the environment and in particular climate change. When all is said and done the only legitimate function of the Federal government will be to have the largest defense department and defense budget in the world. The function of the Federal government will be confined to waging war.
So according to the Supreme Court's philosophy, all social programs like Obamacare or Social Security or Medicare will be relegated to the states. All Federal programs will be deemed illegal. The United States will not even be a nation any more in the sense that France or Germany or China is a nation. The United States will not be capable of having a national policy regarding climate change or anything else. The United States as a nation will be totally weak when it comes to anything except war. There the nation will be all powerful. But when it comes to anything that actually benefits human beings whether here at home or abroad, the United States will be little more than a hollow shell. Other nations will look at the United States, as Nixon stated, as a "pitiful helpless giant." Other nations will not trust the United States since already they know that national policies can change every four years based on which party is in power. Now they also know that the United States has a Supreme Court which is determined to undermine national power at every step and refer everything back to the states.
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