A couple of liberal dissents.

1. I caught a blog commentor yesterday, on Warren Jason Street, responding to another commentor on the disgrace of the Dred Scott decision, described by the first commentor as the absolute low point in Supremes history. No, the respondent said with emphatic clarity: "The worst decision in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court was Gore v. Bush."

   
Dred Scott and Gore v. Bush: A toss-up as worst Supreme Court decisions ever. In the image at right are show the five G.O.P.-appointed Court justices who found for Bush, loser of the 2000 election.

Not sure I agree. Dred Scott condemned an entire race. Then again, Gore v. Bush did not condemn Al Gore alone. It overturned the principle of democracy in the U.S.: the loser of the 2000 presidential contest was installed as president by five members of the Court, a bare majority of the nine justices. It betrayed the baldly partisan nature of a Court that remains GOP-controlled), in which politics triumphed over jurisprudence. And the decision was profoundly hypocritical; the case should not have been heard.

Prior to and following Gore v. Bush, the GOP Court - and it's a sad reflection on a great country to have to describe Courts as GOP or Dem, but that's the reality in America - was an upholder of states rights. In Gore v. Bush, the Supremes trampled all over the rights of Florida, specifically in overturning a Florida Supreme Court ruling that the vote re-counting should continue until completed.

In the segregation era, "states rights" was a polite way of saying that Alabama and Georgia could go their own way in discriminating with impunity against African Americans, and by logical extension, people with blue eyes and anyone else a state chose to regard as subhuman.

That odious tradition continues today, with, among other things, "right to work" laws in U.S. South states that effectively prohibit workers from organizing. That's a violation of the national principle of collective bargaining rights, entrenched with the FDR-era Wagner Act. And that has sucked industrial jobs out of the Midwest. When you hear the term "off-shoring" or "outsourcing," don't think China or Vietnam. Think Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. 

The Detroit Three for the most part haven't deserted the Midwest. There simply is too much talent and too many long-established suppliers in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. GM, Ford and Chrysler have long had plants in New York, California, Texas and so on, to be closer to customers. Also Mexico, in Chrysler-Fiat's case. When Dems insist on upgraded labor conditions in exchange for free-trade pacts with Mexico and other countries, somehow they never mention abysmal labor conditions at home.

It's a different story with the "transplants," the auto factories operated by foreign-owned carmakers that have sprung up in U.S. in the past generation to avoid a tariff wall threatened by Reagan. They started out in Ohio and elsewhere in the Midwest. But in the past two decades the U.S. South's "right to work" laws have drawn the bulk of transplants operated by Nissan, Daimler, BMW and the like to the low-wage U.S. South. "Right to work" is a polite way of informing workers that "You have no say in your workplace conditions, starting with what you're paid."

2. The message below has gone viral among progressive websites. In identifying the "real" culprits of the economic meltdown - actually, the targets of Paul Ryan's looney austerity budget, which was D.O.A. in the Dem-controlled Senate - they left out Medicare recipients, also targeted by a ruthless right.

 

H/T: EB contributor MLC.