When a fox attacks a hen house, is it uncivil for the hens to raise a ruckus?

Two Supreme Court justices say it is. Elevating collegiality above social justice, right-wing extremist Amy Coney Barrett and progressive jurist Sonia Sotomayor have jointly been hailing America’s top Court as a model of genteel political discourse, claiming that the six Republicans and three Democrats disagree agreeably. “We do not interrupt one another, and we never raise our voices,” Barrett primly lectured to a recent conference of civics teachers. Sotomayor chimed in that Court decorum frowns on any internal comments that “could be viewed [by other justices] as hurtful.”

How sweet that the Supremes are so judiciously cordial inside their marble sanctuary. But how bitter that the Court’s lockstep Republican ideologues are so crudely slapping down women’s rights, running roughshod over our environmental protections, stomping on voting rights, enthroning plutocracy, imposing theocracy… and so awful much more. Yet, when any of the three progressive justices do publicly assail these blatantly partisan, anti-democratic edicts, Barrett decorously decries their “stridency,” demurely chiding that “the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

Yoo-hoo, Madame Supreme, can you even hear yourself? Your very elevation to the High Court was a strident affront to our democracy and to the very idea of justice, rammed through in a flagrantly partisan power play by a lame-duck president and a corrupt Republican senator. Please, spare us your phony lectures on judicial propriety!

America would still be an English colony if the rebels of 1776 had not “stridently” risen up and impolitely confronted the kind of elitist governmental authoritarianism that Barrett & Company wants to re-impose on us. Come on, progressives – get rude! Democracy demands that we be confrontational… not courtly.

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Photo by Michael on Flickr.

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