Robert Parry: GOP Five Like Stripping Americans

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



GOP Five Like Stripping Americans
April 3, 2012

Exclusive: The Supreme Court’s GOP Five just finished a run as brave libertarians protecting Americans from President Obama’s health-care reform, but now are back to their usual role as defenders of abusive state power, allowing strip searches of anyone arrested for anything – and perhaps particularly protesters, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


Last week, the five Republican partisans who control the U.S. Supreme Court were all about protecting American “liberties” against the threat of compulsory broccoli purchases. This week, they are defending the rights of prison guards to strip search a nun arrested in an anti-war protest or a black guy who got nabbed by mistake for not paying a fine that he had actually paid.

But the Court’s strip-search ruling on Monday was more about the future than the past. One could almost see the GOP Five rubbing their hands together at the prospect of mass strip searches of young men and women arrested for challenging corporate greed in Occupy protests. Perhaps the justices would like to take a page from Rush Limbaugh’s playbook and suggest the videos be posted online so they could watch.

“Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the Republican majority.

Of course, the justices don’t expect that they and their powerful friends would ever be subjected to such humiliation. That’s more for the lesser beings – or those with lesser money – especially those who find themselves disproportionately tossed into America’s massive prison system: the poor, the minorities and the protesters. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/03/gop-five-like-stripping-americans/

[midnight]

1. This is just so Gitmo...

[es35]

2. It is way past the time to impeach these guys

Hey right-wingers out there, look at what your henchmen on the supreme court just did. If the cops do this to your wives and daughters now, you only have yourselves to blame and blame big time.

[es35]

3. Did the Supremes just hand us the election?

I haven't read the strip search ruling, but it seems that all we have to do is link all the right wing GOP with this decision to push them way down in the polls
I can see it now: Mitt supports the stripping of your wife and daughter by brutal perverted cops!!

of Mitt fully supports GOP thugs who want cops to strip search your daughters and wife.

[321Morrow]

4. Robert Parry has been doing great reporting for decades

He did a great job of covering Central America and CIA drug smuggling in the 1980's and the Nicaraguan contras.

[elleng]

5. On the other hand,

Linda Greenhouse sees rifts within the Court.

'Among this edgy majority, one voice was missing: that of Justice Clarence Thomas. “Justice Thomas joins all but Part IV of this opinion,” a footnote on the first page informs us. But Justice Thomas couldn’t be bothered to explain himself, at least not in public. Presumably he shared his thoughts at some point with his colleagues. We’re left to infer that what he wanted was a bright-line rule that would admit no exceptions, no circumstance under which a strip search might be so uncalled-for as to violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches.

Was this a position that Justice Thomas wanted to maintain without having to defend it in writing? Earlier in his tenure, he wasn’t shy about advocating extreme positions, such as his dissenting opinion in a 1992 case, Hudson v. McMillian, on whether inmates have a constitutional right not to be beaten by prison guards. The majority held that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment could apply regardless of the severity of any resulting injury. Justice Thomas said the Eighth Amendment protected inmates against only “serious injury” at the hands of their jailers, not against “a use of force that causes only insignificant harm.”

By refusing on Monday to sign Justice Kennedy’s part four, Justice Thomas deprived his colleague of a majority for the full range of his opinion, and without explanation. This was a wildly uncollegial act, violating the court’s norm that votes come with reasons. I suspect that the court’s center of gravity in this case, if not the actual opinion assignment, seesawed during the months of consideration. Of course, I don’t know whether Justice Kennedy wrote his part four as the price of retaining the support of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. Might one or both have otherwise joined Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s powerful dissenting opinion and thus flipped the outcome? Or did Justice Breyer start out with a majority that he then lost as Justice Kennedy offered a softer version of an initial position?

All as tantalizing as it is unknowable. The larger point – the relevance to the health care case – is that there are obviously tensions and even rifts within the Supreme Court that don’t map readily onto the one-dimensional 5-to-4 narrative.'

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/embarrass-the-future/?hp