Require Justices To Watch TV Dramas.

The Court’s long anticipated affirmative action decision, like most of its recent decisions, undid decades of precedent and social progress. Again, the conservative majority turned the Constitution on its head. As they have done with the Second Amendment, they twisted the Fourteenth to fit into their reactionary agenda. It now reads “the right to marginalize oppressed minorities shall not be infringed.”

Though California’s 15 year old ban on affirmative action adversely affected minority student admissions, I’m betting many colleges are determined to avoid that from happening nationally. Diversity is in their, and the nation’s, best interests. Despite the Court’s decision, they will find workarounds that will permit them to continue to admit more minority students.

Justifications by the Court for this and other recent decisions have had less to do with rational interpretation of the Constitution than with “because we are a bunch of powerful reactionaries who sold our souls to the extreme right wing of the GOP and the oligarchs and and we say so.”

In addition to its anti-affirmative action decision, the gang of six also rammed through the latest case of a business owner refusing service to people whose lifestyles their personal belief system doesn’t condone. In doing so, they once again asserted that one person’s freedom to “speak,” even when the speech is hate speech, trumps another’s civil rights.

They had so been foaming at the mouth to adjudicate yet another case that would further enshrine hate disguised as religion, their religion, into our legal system that they took a “case” brought by a fake plaintiff who had conjured up a fake would-be client who, she claimed, requested a gay marriage web site. The supposed customer told a reporter he had never approached the woman and has been married, to a woman, for 16 years. If this is true, it sounds like the plaintiff perjured herself, but somehow I doubt the Justices will address that little formality.

Experts say this ruling and others like it create a slippery slope that, taken to the extreme, could eventually lead to lawful systematic discrimination against minorities reminiscent of of Jim Crow.

What poetic justice it would be if the outgrowth of his own decisions led to Clarence “Uncle Tom” Thomas’s imprisonment for miscegenation.

Short of that, or impeaching Thomas and Alito on ethics violations and the other four right- wingers for violating of the Constitution, is there any way to deal with the corrupt cartel that Joe Biden, in the understatement of the year, described as “not a normal Court?”

For a start they could be forbidden from going on fishing trips with billionaires and enjoined from taking big payoffs to preach White Christian Nationalism to white collar terrorist organizations like the Federalist Society.

An additional solution would be to bring them up to speed with the realities of the 21st century. Based on my own experience, this could be accomplished by requiring Justices to watch more TV dramas.

Not having been in the habit of watching network TV for several decades, I was unaware of how much society, according to TV, has evolved during that time. Now, catching up on some of what I have missed, I have been amazed at how shows produced over the past ten to fifteen years portray, if not the whole reality of today’s world, a much improved version of it.

Justices should be tied to their Lazyboys, toothpicks propping open their eyelids, their TV sets tuned to these enlightened shows.

Those that I have been enjoying are peopled with characters in many colors and hues portrayed not as racial stereotypes but, rather, as whole human beings. Interracial relationships and marriage are commonplace. LGTBQ+ characters are treated matter-of-factly, their lifestyles implicitly affirmed. These multicolored, sexually diverse characters include doctors, lawyers, scientists, political leaders, elected officials and businesspeople who are every bit as competent and ethical as anyone else. Quite a bit more so when compared with some members of the Court.

Art imitates life and, especially when it comes to TV, life imitates art. Art always anticipates social change. Despite the efforts of backward thinking Justices, such change arrived on our screens a good while back and is playing out in the real world today.

Will this Court, one that has deservedly earned the disapproval and distrust of a huge majority of Americans, prevail in its mission to take us back to the 1950s? Heck, to the 1770s?

In the short run, maybe. But if Americans stay glued to the tube, more attitudes will change and, eventually, justice may yet prevail.

Stay tuned. This show is far from over.