Occam's Razor

So this is what a conservative majority of the Supreme Court looks like, eh? With her recent confirmation, we have a 6-3 conservative majority with the addition of now Justice Amy Coney Barrett. In one of Justice Barrett’s early decisions, she quickly showed the conservative majority’s power and proved Chief Justice John Roberts the newest “moderate” on the court. In a recent  5-4 decision, the Supreme Court nixed New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to temporarily ban worship at houses of worship in the state’s hot covid-19 zones.

Places packed with people of course are natural zones for spreading this coronavirus. Infections there get passed on, not just to congregants in these houses of worship, but to people outside them, some of whom will also pass it on. It all spreads the disease but, hey, your right to worship in the First Amendment is apparently is more important than your desire to not catch this often-deadly disease. Maybe this is because there is no amendment is in the Constitution saying you have the right to a functioning public health system that can take obvious measures in the name of public health.

“Even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten,” the opinion said. “The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.”

Thanks for clarifying that, justices. It’s not like Governor Cuomo issued an edict closing houses of worship permanently. He did it until the disease was under control in these hot zones. This allowed worshippers, but also those who don’t worship there or practice religion at all, to avoid infection and potential death. Until now, this was a perfectly reasonable standard. Now, the Supreme Court is okay with you being dead of covid-19 if it temporarily infringes on someone else’s religious liberty.

I’d like to say this is something new, but the conservative majority has been around since the George W. Bush era. It now just has another member and an expanded majority. Sometimes these decisions expanding liberty are good, such as in the case of allowing universal gay marriage, even though marriage is not a right actually spelled out in our federal constitution. But at other times, it’s been bad. The Supremes decided you have the right to own a gun no matter what, and since that time lots of people have died who would not have had they upheld common sense gun control laws where it was obviously needed.

The premise of liberty seems to be that risk is inherent in the exercise of liberty. It’s just that until fairly recently, this risk was born on those wanting to exercise their liberty instead of everyone else. While about a third of gun-related murders are suicide, the rest are homicides, most likely inflicted against family members, neighbors or other intimates. This decision is just more of the same, except had Justice Ginsberg not died and had not Justice Barrett so quickly replaced her, it would likely have been 5-4 the other way. In other words, sanity would have likely prevailed.

The Supreme Court’s decision here essentially is a death warrant for at least thousands of Americans, and will sicken tens or hundreds of thousands more. Most likely, if you could poll these people (it’s hard to poll dead people) they would disagree with this decision, but apparently, they don’t matter. Preventable death is an unfortunate consequence of having so much liberty.

This is what happens when you put ideologically strict constructionists in our courts. Real life is not allowed to have any impact on their decisions. Instead, these decisions are based not on what our founding fathers really thought about these liberties, but on what they think they might have thought about them, had these founding fathers never interacted in the real world at all.

It’s likely that this court will find new and similar ways to expand liberty, like by denying women the liberty to have an abortion because the liberty to fetal life is somewhere in the U.S. constitution, in their minds. Fetuses without brains even capable of cogitating will be endowed with future freedoms thanks to our enlightened Supreme Court, I’m betting. I’m betting this court will find ways to reduce social benefits because laws like social security weren’t explicitly in the Constitution either. And we’ll all feel freer if we stand on our own two feet, and pay-as-you-go for life, they will figure. Freedom through bad circumstance and a rigged economic system make living better!

I just hope we survive all this liberty. Chances are many of us won’t. And we’ll enjoy a new unarticulated freedom inherent in the Constitution: the right to a premature and miserable death so that others can exercise their freedoms stupidly and/or with malicious intent.

What progress!