This morning's two Supreme Court decisions-- one that allows employers claiming to have religious objections to discriminate against women's health needs and one that says public service unions can't compel members to pay dues-- were both decided late in the afternoon on January 30, 2006 when 19 Democrats crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans against the Democratic filibuster against New Jersey corporate whore Sam Alito. Almost all of them-- from Lieberman to Blanche Lincoln to Max Baucus and Ben Nelson-- are gone from the Senate now, but these 7 Alito-enablers are still calling themselves Senate Democrats:
• Maria Cantwell (WA)• Tom Carper (DE)• Tim Johnson (SD)• Mary Landrieu (LA)• Bill Nelson (FL)• Mark Pryor (AR)• Jay Rockefeller (WV)
Among those with the foresight and understanding to vote to make sure Alito would never become a Supreme Court judge-- and do what he did today (yes, he authored both the opinions-- were Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), John Kerry (D-MA), Harry Reid (D-NV), as well as Joe Biden (D-DE), Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and… Barack Obama (D-IL). Every Republican voted for Alito, including fake moderate Susan Collins (R-ME). It's worth noting that two actual moderates, Vermont's Jim Jeffords (who had just switched from Republican to Independent) and Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) opposed Alito on the final confirmation vote, unlike Susan Collins.That's what you can expect when you vote for Republicans and conservative Democrats: garbage in the judiciary like Alito. A new poll showed that a majority of Americans oppose letting employers, based on their religious views, exclude certain contraceptives from workers’ insurance coverage. That only 35% of Americans agreed with the Hobby Lobby arguments didn't slow down Alito and his right wing brethren on the Court.Maine progressive Democrat Shenna Bellows is very much not Susan Collins, nor anything like her. She would not have enabled these two awful Supreme Court rulings by voting to confirm Sam Alito and today she spoke out forcefully against both of them. "The working people of this country earn higher wages and better benefits when they bargain collectively," she said in regard to Harris v. Quinn. "The labor movement brought Americans out of an era when pay was abysmal, health care coverage was often nonexistent and child labor laws were weak. Today we're facing challenges just as serious: weakening pensions, a badly out-of-date minimum wage, a Social Security system under constant political attack and endless fights over wage and labor standards that shouldn't be controversial. Organized labor raises the living standards of millions of Americans, helping them pay their bills and take care of their families. Today's ruling strikes another blow against the support system those families rely on. Every public sector union worker today wondering who will stand with with them in the next Congress should know I'll have their back. They need allies to fight with them against the Court's steady erosion of their power, and I can't wait to join them as Maine's next senator."Progressive thought leaders Shenna Bellows and Marianne WilliamsonBefore we get to what Shenna had to say about Hobby Lobby, I want to mention that I was at an event for her last week and ran into Marianne Williamson there, another stalwart progressive who recently ran for Congress and lost, in part, because a conservative Democrat, Wendy Greuel, smeared her as being "more anti-Choice than Texas." This morning I asked Marianne about her reaction to the Supreme Court ruling. Her perspective-- the reason why Blue America backed her-- is unique, thought-provoking and very much outside-the-box.
The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision claims to show respect for people's religious views, but in fact it shows no respect for anyone or anything except some supreme right of our new business overlords to make whatever decisions they damn well please.The current majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is a bunch of political hacks, there not to show respect for the Constitution so much as to pave the way for unprecedented corporate rule in the United States.The danger here is to something even more important than a woman's right to have her birth control paid for by insurance. The danger is that this court is taking away basic hope from its most important place of residence: the mind of the U.S. citizen. No longer can we say with any seriousness at all that no matter what, we will always be able to take an issue to the Supreme Court in order to gauge its alignment with our Constitutional rights. With the make-up of this Court, that very idea has become almost a joke. And the problem is no longer simmering. It is starting to boil.
This is from the Shenna Bellows press release that went out this morning after the decision was handed down:
"Neither your boss nor the government should interfere in your personal decisions about whether or when to use birth control. Today's horrible Supreme Court decision disregards women's health and opens the door to religious discrimination by employers. We need leadership in Congress who will stand up for reproductive freedom without exceptions."In 2012, Republican Susan Collins voted in favor of this very outcome when she voted in favor of the Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed companies to deny reproductive health care coverage to their employees based on a moral preference.Sen. Collins also supports a large religious exemption loophole in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which recently passed the Senate. Bellows opposes the loophole and recently proposed a national Human Rights Act, modeled after Maine's, that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT Americans with no exceptions. You can read about that proposal and Bellows' leadership on LGBT issues in her widely read Huffington post article."Religious exemptions-- whether in health care law or anti-discrimination legislation-- are nothing more than an excuse to allow certain people to impose their own moral standards on others and deny freedoms to those who work for them," Bellows said. "Employers' personal beliefs have no place blocking freedoms guaranteed to Americans in the US Constitution."
If you want to make sure there are no more Justices like Sam Alito writing these kinds of horrifying decisions, help replace Susan Collins with Shenna Bellows. This isn't about when an FEC quarter ends; it's about when we take control back of our country from corporate interests.