fossil_digger Report This Comment Date: March 16, 2013 05:55PM
In the United States, the Supreme Court has final say over whether any law is
constitutional. So in a way it's the final barrier that prevents any legislators
from getting too crazy or racist in the laws they pass.
But the Supreme Court itself is not made up of gods or wizards. They are just
people, with agendas. And sometimes they have rendered opinions that make you
wonder if the whole legal system isn't just full of crazy people from the top
down. For instance, the court has ruled ...
#5. A Business Can Kick You Out of Your House if It Wants to Build There
Home ownership is truly a dream for many of us. The security of having a house
to live in, building equity and owning a large enough floor plan to install the
Batcave (it simply will not fit in a studio apartment) is second to none. It is
your property, your sanctuary, and as long as you pay the mortgage, no one can
take it away from you. Unless, that is, some corporation wants to build
there.
You probably already know that there is such thing as eminent domain -- the
Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution mentions the taking away of private
property by the government for public use (as long as they pay you for it), like
if they need to build a highway or something there. But in the city of New
London, Connecticut, seven homeowners had their property forcibly acquired by
the government, and it wasn't for a new overpass or water treatment plant:
Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, wanted to build a facility there.
The city council argued that it was really the same thing -- given the potential
economic growth and the jobs the pharmaceutical company would bring into the
community, the acquisition could be considered as being for the public good
(this is the same line of reasoning Obi-Wan Kenobi used when telling Luke
Skywalker that his father was dead, when his father was actually both alive and
Darth Vader). The seven unlucky property owners who were forced to sell their
homes and move thought this was hot steaming bullshit (one of the homes they
wanted to bulldoze had stood for more than a century) and took their case all
the way to the Supreme Court in what is known as Kelo v. City of New London
(2005).
The highest court in the land sided with New London, because money makes you nod
your head at inappropriate times. The homeowners had their houses taken away
from them and demolished (and were paid an amount the government decided was
fair) to make way for the pharmaceutical company. The company then heroically
ran out of funds and didn't build anything, leaving an empty vacant lot that was
eventually turned into a garbage dump.
#4. Scientists Can Create Life (And Corporations Can Own It)
Back in 1980, a genetic engineer working for General Electric named Ananda Mahan
Chakrabarty artificially grew a new bacterium with the ability to eat crude oil,
which is actually a really great idea, assuming the thing is restricted to oil
spills and it doesn't get loose and eat all of the oil out of the wells. When he
sought a patent for it, however, the courts were horrified. By law, living
things cannot be patented -- that's the shit of dystopian sci-fi right
there.
But the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of
Chakrabarty, saying that since the "composition of matter" was not
found anywhere in nature, then a "human-made micro-organism is patentable
subject matter." Moreover, the ruling literally states that the fact that
microorganisms are alive "is not a significant enough legal issue."
So, to recap, you can patent a living thing, as long as you've created it
specifically to defy nature. Clone a frog? No dice. Clone a frog with curling
demon horns and black-veined leathery wings to serve in your personal army of
supervillain henchmen? Totally legal.
Since the ruling, scientists have created all kinds of genetically engineered
punchlines like "self-destruct" plant seeds -- plants that are immune
to certain herbicides, but will not reproduce. The idea is that farmers have to
rebuy the same crops every year, and the seeds are sold by the same companies
that make the herbicides (so if you don't buy your seeds from them, your crops
will get the shit poisoned out of them like the little girl in The Sixth Sense).
If anyone somehow manages to grow the same crop the following year without
paying for new seeds, they are essentially duplicating a patented product and
are subject to legal action, the very same treatment given to people who sell
knockoff Ray-Bans and Coach bags from the back of a pool-cleaning van.
These shenanigans aren't just limited to bacteria and seeds and other things
that most people don't care about -- the "post-Chakrabarty" world has
seen companies gaining patents of specially designed breeds of mice, chickens,
dogs, cows, pigs, rabbits and monkeys. Again, these aren't just animals that are
owned -- these are animals whose entire existence is owned, the very idea of
them protected by intellectual copyright laws. If someone engineers a penguin
with stegosaurus spikes and patents that abomination, you can't even draw a
picture of it without getting sued. The Chakrabarty ruling makes no distinction,
and instead puts the ethical burden entirely on the patent office, an
institution that normally presides over drawings of fart whistles and Chia Pets
in the shape of Barack Obama.
#3. You Can Imprison an Entire Race, if You Have a Good Reason
As you know, during World War II, the U.S. government rounded up every legal
American citizen of Japanese descent on the West Coast and placed them all in
internment camps, just to make sure they didn't turn on us and start spying on
behalf of their old home country. This "Let's round up an entire race, just
to be safe" plan was done while America was also at war with the Nazis, and
the nation almost completely missed the irony.
You may be wondering how the hell this was legal, and the truth is that somebody
did in fact ask the same question. Japanese-American Fred Korematsu sued over
it, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And in Korematsu v. United
States, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of interning the Japanese. The idea
was that the risk of Japanese espionage (despite never having actually occurred)
outweighed Korematsu's individual rights.
The decision has never been overturned.
Now, we should point out that no one has ever tried to use the precedent since
then to justify doing the same sort of thing (although someone could, at any
moment). But here's where it gets weird: Every great legal advancement in the
American Civil Rights movement, from the desegregation of schools to the
legalization of interracial marriage, was made possible because of this decision
to imprison American citizens because they looked like the people who bombed
Pearl Harbor.
How the hell is that possible? Well, in the decision, the court basically said,
"Yes, you can discriminate against this race, but only because we're in a
world war and the entire country is at stake, and this is the only solution that
keeps us safe. If any future discrimination doesn't meet this standard, it's
unconstitutional."
In legal terms, they were saying that any laws that discriminate in the future
must meet the "strict scrutiny" standard, and almost nothing can. To
pass strict scrutiny, a law must serve a "compelling governmental
interest," be "narrowly tailored" to that interest and be as
unrestrictive as possible. So while the court somehow thought Japanese
internment met that standard, school segregation did not. It's like they were
saying, "Yes, we'll give you this horribly racist law, but this is the last
one."
So, the same line of reasoning that ended segregation and the ban on interracial
marriage can, at any moment (remember, it has never been overturned), be used to
profile and imprison any race of American citizen as soon as the Supreme Court
decides that they pose a threat to national security.
#2. Mining Companies Can Go "Scorched Earth" on the Environment, if
They Get Permission
The Clean Water Act was passed by the government in the wake of the Love Canal
incident (which is not the pornography it sounds like) and other similar cases
of reckless pollution. Basically, Love Canal was used as a toxic waste
depository by a company called Hooker Chemical, eventually holding about 21,000
tons of deadly material. Hooker then sold the property to the Niagara Falls
School Board for one dollar, detailing the presence of the waste and denying any
liability for anything that should happen as a result. The school board bought
the land and built houses on it. Predictably, the toxic waste in Love Canal
eventually leaked out into the community, causing a massive health scare.
The Clean Water Act is meant to prevent this. It says that waste cannot be
dumped into lakes, rivers or bays (the ocean is fair game, because we can't
drink it, so who gives a shit?). By its very definition, it protects fresh water
from willful pollution, saving communities from future disasters such as the one
that befell Love Canal (again, not a porno).
But then in 2002, Congress amended the Clean Water Act to allow the dumping of
"fill materials" -- as in dirt and gravel -- into fresh waterways to
create a dam. Well, that makes sense. That's not the same thing as dumping
poison. They said it would be up to the Army Corps of Engineers to issue permits
to do that. So far, so good.
But under this law, when the Kensington gold mine in Alaska reopened, they were
totally given a permit to dump waste debris from the mine (which included 4.5
million tons of incredibly toxic material like lead and mercury) into nearby
Lower Slate Lake. This would be enough poison to kill everything in the
lake.
Why were they allowed to do this? Well, when the reopening of the mine was first
proposed back when the amendment to the Clean Water Act was made, the Bush
administration labeled the toxic waste "fill material" and argued that
the mine would in fact be building a dam in Lower Slate Lake, albeit an
aggressively poisonous dam that no living thing on the planet had either
requested or required. Considering that the Environmental Protection Agency
hadn't allowed mining companies to dump hazardous materials in more than 30
years, and that the "fill material" from the Kensington mine would
literally kill every fish in the water, environmentalists sued the Alaskan
government.
However, the Supreme Court upheld the decision to label the mine debris as
allowable fill material, and insisted that the Army Corps of Engineers had acted
in a reasonable way by permitting a gold mine to take a radioactive shit on an
entire ecosystem, because money makes you nod your head at inappropriate times
(see above).
#1. The Government Can Sterilize You in the Name of Eugenics
The case of Buck v. Bell (1927) started when 17-year-old Carrie Buck was sent to
the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (the existence of which
should foreshadow all that's to follow) on the grounds of promiscuity and
feeble-mindedness, after being raped and impregnated by the nephew of her foster
parents. The foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs, thought it was the right
thing to do, because if anyone found out that Carrie was raped by their nephew,
their family name would be forever tainted. Since we are currently sitting here
nine decades later writing about what pieces of shit they were, the Dobbs' grand
experiment failed douchetastically.
Anyway, while Carrie was institutionalized, it was ordered that she be
sterilized for being "feeble-minded" under Indiana state law. The
state determined that since both Carrie and her mom had been committed to the
Colony of Crazies, it proved that the Buck line was "defective."
Carrie appealed the decision. Dozens of "experts" testified in favor
of Carrie's sterilization in front of the Supreme Court, noting her lack of
intelligence, her daughter's funny looks and her mother's history of
prostitution.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of compulsory sterilization in an
8-1 decision, making it totally legal to remove testicles and scrape wombs
barren if it prevents the spread of undesirable genetic traits such as madness,
stupidity and disease (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. literally said
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough" when referring to the
Bucks).
Carrie's daughter was taken away and placed in the care of the foster parents,
and Carrie and her younger sister were both sterilized to prevent the spread of
feeble-mindedness (her sister's sterilization was masked as an
"appendicitis operation," for the sake of hijinks).
