This article by Richard Grossman was originally published in CounterPunch on April 16, 2010.

So the Supreme Court has been igniting passions, has it? Of its Citizens United decision, people cried: “shameless hypocrisy,” “nothing short of fraud . . . ,” “Truly frightening . . . ,” “a narrow elite is imposing itself through the legal system . . . ”

There are mobilizings to amend the constitution, impeach “the Supreme Court 5,” instruct the president on Justice Stevens’ replacement. Senator Schumer, here in the Empire State, is working on a bill that would force business and nonprofit corporations to reveal their involvement in elections!

If Schumer and others are determined to confront the Supreme Court, maybe they are unearthing the sources of Citizens United and related constitutional infelicities, formulating research questions like: By what flimflam did the 1787 “Miracle in Philadelphia” convention deny the majority of humans in this new nation standing before the law? Why did the people who were people in the early 1800s let Supreme Court justices seize the authority to amend the Constitution?

But Schumer isn’t very determined. He told the NY Times Company the other day: “What we’re trying to do first is make sure everything we do is within the constitutional mandate set by the Court.”

What’s with such obeisance? Why allow humans in black robes to limit our aspirations, supply our words, command our deeds? It’s not so hard to ask: So, what IS the United States Supreme Court? What has been the Court’s role in valiant human struggles to nullify England’s and the USA’s defining of whole classes of people – the majority, actually – as unequal, inferior, invisible? How often has it invoked the Anglo-Saxon’s unique reverence for law to instruct the rabble on progress and civilization?

When slaves, free Africans, Native peoples, women, indentured servants, immigrants, birth control and sexual orientation advocates appealed to the Constitution for remedy, how did our honorable justices craft the law of the land? When farmers, workers and whole communities built a mass movement to form a cooperative commonwealth instead of a corporate-industrial order, whose values, sayeth the Court, wielded the Constitution against whom?

When people opposing US government imperialism and wars vexed white, male, propertied elites privileged with constitutional head starts, who, ruled the Court, properly called upon the armed might of the nation?

It’s not a pretty story. MORE…