Back to the old days
By John Marshall
The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The swift debut of her successor-in-waiting. An ailing president, his covid-contaminated White House: This and more brings into high relief a scene of America scrambled, like an infield after a bunt. This is the America we’ve chosen, the product of recent elections, Statehouse to White House.
Ginsburg’s death has allowed President Trump his third appointment to the Supreme Court and power to reshape it for generations; conservatives will have a solid 6-3 majority. Ginsburg was among the Court’s moderates and liberals; her apparent successor, Amy Barrett, is the opposite. Her jurisprudence evokes the old days, when the constitution held the kind of strictures that sanctioned Dred Scott and the Fugitive Slave Act. In recent years the court has stripped the voting rights act and unwound campaign finance laws (Citizens United).
Senate Republicans are itching to confirm Barrett’s appointment to replace Ginsburg. Their reshaped Court will be poised to nullify the Affordable Care Act, dismantle Roe Vs. Wade, cripple labor unions, hack away at the EPA and OSHA, and reinforce gerrymandering in state voting laws.
Welcome back to the old days.
For years we had apparently labored under the delusion that government, wherever necessary, should be an agency of human welfare. In a modern industrial society, we thought, all individual effort must be braced by a government that guaranteed, at least, opportunities for those who want to work, food for those who would otherwise starve, pensions for the old and medical care for the sick. For a long time, even Republicans believed that government should make life more rewarding for all citizens, no matter their race or gender.
Kansas was once a progressive state, founded on the moral principle that slavery was wrong. Republicans were the party of reform in Kansas and in Washington; they worked with progressive Democrats to establish a Federal Trade Commission, minimum wages for men and women, the prohibition of child labor, antitrust laws, a federal income tax, the 40-hour week, and other reforms. Later came hot lunches in schools, statewide polio immunization, new reservoirs for flood control and recreation.
Our legislature financed better highways, a Turnpike,, mental health reforms, aid to schools, colleges and universities, county health clinics and hospitals, aid for the poor, the sick and the elderly. Legislators in the early 1990s even created a “children’s budget” to reinforce promise for the next generations.
All that changed. Almost overnight Republicans became the party of Trump, exalting a baroque theology of power over principle and fueled only by a primal urge to prevail.
The U.S. Senate is no longer “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” There, minority Democrats spin in futility, and the majority Republicans are little more than Trump’s devoted streetwalkers. Once a place that welcomed ideas, the senate is now a place where ideas go to die – or don’t go at all.
Republicans have revived the old American Protestant culture, its credo that man is responsible directly before God for his conscience and his acts without the intercession of government. Men and women ‒ and cities, counties and school districts ‒ are responsible for their own lives, and must strive (themselves) to make them rewarding. Government, and now science, have become barriers; they only get in the way.
In recent years, the courts have resisted Republican efforts to dismantle laws and agencies of reform – environmental protection, affordable health care, civil rights, voting rights and campaign finance, among others. But President Trump and his senators have packed federal courts with new judges who believe that government obstructs, rather than enhances, our lives.
With a libertarian judiciary, it will make little difference who is in the White House or which parties control the congress. The courts ultimately rule.
What a Kansas court says won’t much matter. A proper lawsuit and sympathetic federal judges may carry the day and reverse the decision. The Trump Courts may step on state school finance, women’s rights ( with Roe v. Wade a fading memory), our health and welfare programs, gun laws, voting laws and more.
But this is what we have elected. We choose legislators who promise a future in the past, the old days before government had muscled in with such atrocities as crop subsidies, school lunches, flood control, social security and the 40-hour work week.
Kansans will elect a state legislature dominated by the old Brownback faithful, and Kansas will vote solidly for Trump and his loyal houseboy, Roger Marshall. This is what we want, the past as future.
In the distance, a faint peal of wedding bells for church and state. We can roll back the EPA and OSHA. We can welcome back Big oil, Big Plastic, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco – all expectant, eager in the wings.
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