When the Supreme Court meddled in the 2000 election, taking charge of what
should have been a regular -- if stressful -- process of electoral recount,
were you surprised? I was. At that point, I thought the court had more
judicial good sense than to cross the line into political activism ... I
was wrong. But then, we had just turned the corner into a new century. I
had high expectations for a bright future and easy slide into
ground-breaking modernity.

*Pffffft!
*
Hadn't fully anticipated the effort it would take to pull our feet out of
the bucket of sludge we were standing in, I guess. But after a dozen years
of dealing with the slime, and as the 2012 energy floods the planet, I ...
we ... have high expectations for a course correction.

This week, having lived with the results of the *Citizens United* ruling
and watched the Robert's court sail through case after case favoring
corporations, we find ourselves suffering a long moment of suspense while
the court decides on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Because those who serve on the High Court have become increasingly partisan
and idiosyncratic, there is no way to predict this judgment -- although if
I had to guess, I'd suspect they'll let the ACA stand rather than make such
a terrible mess of things. A negative outcome would [too quickly] turn our
very slow-moving Ship of State on its axis and create political and social
confusion at a pivotal time in the election season that would make waves we
can't even anticipate. The backwash might even swamp the very political
movement our Federalist Supremes want to promote.

Still, there's no way of knowing how this will turn out and we anticipate
this to be a year of shocks and surprises. To get this moment on the
record, then, I'm posting the best reads [and links] from this last week on
the prospects of the judicial process: Robert Scheer rants for us and the
New York Times editorial board demands common sense, while EJ Dionne and
Bob Reich hint at what might be possible if the Supremes act rashly and
rule as the political ideologues they are. I'm also including a list of
links for those ambitious enough to want to dig through the bowels of this
issue, heavy on the legalese.

First though, a read from today -- essentially "after the fact" of the
three-day riot-fest of speculation and intrigue -- that sums up the cost
the Court is now ... FINALLY ... paying for its perceived bias, posted as
illustration to a hypothesis I explored in my PlanetWaves blog
piece<http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/by-judith-gayle-2/regarding-conflict/>this
weekend.

With cranky computer and Merc retro issues ... all of which try my patience
and impede my progress in posting ... I'm determined to get this out on the
last day of the month. We shall see if I'm successful, much as we'll
eventually see if the High Court chooses precedent over activism, justice
over power.

We must intend the Highest and Best outcome, no matter the ruling.

Keep the faith,

Jude

*Obamacare Is On Trial. So Is the Supreme Court.*
Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic
March 29, 2012
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/102204/supreme-court-roberts-ke...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/102204/supreme-court-roberts-ke...>

Before this week, the well-being of tens of millions of Americans was at
stake in the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act.

Now something else is at stake, too: The legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

Nobody knows how the justices will rule. And nobody can know, not even the
justices themselves. On Friday morning, perhaps by the time you read this,
they will meet privately to take their first vote. More often than not,
this first vote determines the final verdict. But there are exceptions and
Anthony Kennedy, on whose decision the outcome presumably depends, has a
reputation for long deliberation and changes of heart—particularly in major
cases like this one.

That’s good. With the result apparently in doubt—smart money still says the
chances of the full law surviving are about 50-50—Kennedy should think long
and hard about how he wants the Court to rule. So should Chief Justice John
Roberts, who appeared more skeptical of the government’s case during oral
arguments but nevertheless indicated that he, like Kennedy, understood the
government’s premise—that health care was a special market, perhaps
requiring special intervention.

If that concern is not enough to sway the chief justice, than perhaps his
frequently professed concern for the court’s respectability will.

Even now, I have trouble wrapping my mind around what I saw in the
courtroom this week and what a majority of the justices may be
contemplating. Kennedy’s second question, the one that so unnerved supports
of the law, was whether the government had “a heavy burden of justification
to show authorization under the Constitution.” But the heavy burden in this
case is on the justices threatening to strike down health care reform. They
have not met it.

Rarely in American history has the Court struck down laws in decisions that
would have such quick, widespread impact. In the modern era, only two cases
come to mind: Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Both were acts
of ambitious, even audacious judicial activism. But, in two key repsects,
they were different from a potential ruling against the Affordable Care Act.

Brown was a unanimous, nine-to-zero decision. Roe was a lopsided
seven-to-two. These margins mattered: The justices knew that their
decisions would be controversial, in part because they were overruling
democratically elected majorities—in these cases, state legislators who’d
passed laws enforcing segregation and prohibiting abortion. The justices’
authority in these cases derived, in part, from their moral authority. A
closely divided bench would have made that impossible.

Virtually everybody agrees that a vote to strike down the Affordable Care
Act would be five to four—a bare majority. And it would be a bare partisan
majority, with the five Republican appointees overruling the four
Democratic appointees. The decision would appear nakedly partisan and
utterly devoid of principle. Appearances would not be deceiving.

The second distinction is even more more significant. Today Brown is a
nearly universal icon of social progress, while Roe remains an object of
great controversy. But, for better or for worse, both cases represented
efforts to change the everyday reality of American life. With Brown, the
justices were tearing down barriers to racial equality; with Roe, the
justices were eliminating laws that prevented access to abortion.

But in this case, nobody has said they want to stop government from
providing universal access to health care. On the contrary, the plaintiffs
have stated that a program like Medicare, in which the government provides
citizens with insurance directly, would be clearly constitutional. They’ve
also stated that a scheme of compulsory private insurance would be
constitutional if somehow the government could make people buy it when they
show up at the hospital—suggesting, as Elena Kagan stated, that the only
problem with the Affordable Care Act is temporal.

Most amazing of all: The plaintiffs have conceded that a universal health
insurance program would be constitutional if, instead of penalizing people
who decline to get insurance, the government enacted a tax and refunded the
money to people who had insurance. As Sonia Sotomayor noted, functionally
such a scheme would be exactly the same as the Affordable Care Act. Both
the plaintiffs and some of the skeptical justices have also indicated that
the Affordable Care Act would be constitutional if the law's architects had
simply used the word "tax" to describe the penalty.

Think about that for a second: If the justices strike down the Affordable
Care Act, they would be stopping the federal government from pursuing a
perfectly constitutional goal via a perfectly constitutional scheme just
because Congress and the Preisdent didn’t use perfectly constitutional
language to describe it. Maybe labels matter, although case law suggests
otherwise. But do they matter enough for the Court to throw out a law that
will provide insurance to 30 million people, shore up insurance for many
more, and help to manage one-sixth of the American economy? It wouldn’t
seem so.

Of course, the conservative justices who would invalidate the Affordable
Care Act may not hold the law in especially high regard. Samuel Alito, in
particular, suggested during oral argument that he had serious problems
with younger, healthier people subsidizing, via their insurance premiums,
the medical expenses of older, sicker people—which just happens to be the
defining feature of Medicare, Social Security, and every other social
insurance scheme on the planet.

Alito is entitled to his opinion about what makes for good legislation. But
he’s not entitled to impose that opinion on the country and his colleagues
aren’t, either. Their job is to determine whether a law is constitutional,
not whether a law is wise. And the more significant the law, the more
unambiguous their judgment ought to be. ++

*The Supreme Court’s Momentous Test*
New York Times Editorial Board
March 27, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/opinion/the-supreme-courts-momentou...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/opinion/the-supreme-courts-momentou...>

In ruling on the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to obtain
health insurance, the Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will
recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of
Congress.

Are the Supreme Court justices giving due consideration to the health care
law, or preparing to engage in “judicial activism” to reduce federal power?

The skepticism in the questions from the conservative justices suggests
that they have adopted the language and approach of the insurance mandate’s
challengers. But the arguments against the mandate, the core of the health
care reform law, willfully reject both the reality of the national health
care market and established constitutional principles that have been upheld
for generations.

The Obama administration persuasively argues that the mandate is central to
solving the crisis in America’s health care system, which leaves 50 million
people uninsured and accounts for 17.6 percent of the national economy. The
challengers contend that the law is an unlimited — and, therefore,
unconstitutional — use of federal authority to force individuals to buy
insurance, or pay a penalty.

That view wrongly frames the mechanism created by this law. The insurance
mandate is nothing like requiring people to buy broccoli — a comparison
Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his exasperated questioning of
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. Congress has no interest in requiring
broccoli purchases because the failure to buy broccoli does not push that
cost onto others in the system.

Congress has indisputable authority to regulate national markets and
provide for the general welfare through its broad power to tax. Nothing
about the mandate falls outside those clearly delineated powers.

In fact, Justice Scalia has, in the recent past, declared Congress’s broad
authority under the commerce clause to regulate activities with far less
direct economic impact. In a 2005 case upholding a federal law prohibiting
the growing of medical marijuana for personal use, he wrote that Congress
may regulate even intrastate activities “that do not themselves
substantially affect interstate commerce.”

The skepticism of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Scalia and
Samuel Alito Jr. was also troubling because it seemed to accept an odd
distinction of timing made by the opponents of the law.

Those critics concede that the mandate would be constitutional if it went
into effect at the moment an individual actually needed health care. In
other words, Congress could require the sick and dying to pay for insurance
or for medical services when they show up in the emergency room, but it
cannot require precoverage of medical costs through insurance.

The court has no authority under the Constitution to judge the merits or
effectiveness of the health care law. That is Congress’s job.

Yet, as Justice Stephen Breyer remarked about the points made by a lawyer
for the opponents: “All that sounds like you’re debating the merits of the
bill.” To counter the challengers’ claims of alarm over a novel policy, he
offered several examples in American history where the court has strongly
backed new solutions to major problems, like the creation of a national
bank in the early 19th century.

If the Supreme Court hews to established law, the only question it must
answer in this case is modest: Did Congress have a rational basis for
concluding that the economic effects of a broken health care system
warranted a national solution? The answer is incontrovertibly yes. ++

*Health Care Jujitsu*
Robert Reich, his blog via HuffPo
03/26/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/single-payer-health-care_b...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/single-payer-health-care_b...>

Not surprisingly, today's debut Supreme Court argument over the so-called
"individual mandate" requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved
around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a "tax," and the
question of whether the issue is ripe for review.

Behind this judicial foreplay is the brute political fact that if the Court
decides the individual mandate is an unconstitutional extension of federal
authority, the entire law starts unraveling.

But with a bit of political jujitsu, the president could turn any such
defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system -- Medicare for
all.

Here's how.

The dilemma at the heart of the new law is that it continues to depend on
private health insurers, who have to make a profit or at least pay all
their costs including marketing and advertising.

Yet the only way private insurers can afford to cover everyone with
preexisting health problems, as the new law requires, is to have every
American buy health insurance - including young and healthier people who
are unlikely to rack up large healthcare costs.

This dilemma is the product of political compromise. You'll remember the
Administration couldn't get the votes for a single-payer system such as
Medicare for all. It hardly tried. Not a single Republican would even agree
to a bill giving Americans the option of buying into it.
But don't expect the Supreme Court to address this dilemma. It lies buried
under an avalanche of constitutional argument.

Those who are defending the law in Court say the federal government has
authority to compel Americans to buy health insurance under the Commerce
Clause of the Constitution, which gives Washington the power to regulate
interstate commerce. They argue our sprawling health insurance system
surely extends beyond an individual state.

Those who are opposing the law say a requirement that individuals contract
with private insurance companies isn't regulation of interstate commerce.
It's coercion of individuals.
Unhappily for Obama and the Democrats, most Americans don't seem to like
the individual mandate very much anyway. Many on the political right
believe it a threat to individual liberty. Many on the left object to being
required to buy something from a private company.

The President and the Democrats could have avoided this dilemma in the
first place if they'd insisted on Medicare for all, or at least a public
option.

After all, Social Security and Medicare require every working American to
"buy" them. The purchase happens automatically in the form of a deduction
from everyone's paychecks. But because Social Security and Medicare are
government programs financed by payroll taxes they don't feel like
mandatory purchases.

Americans don't mind mandates in the form of payroll taxes for Social
Security or Medicare. In fact, both programs are so popular even
conservative Republicans were heard to shout "don't take away my Medicare!"
at rallies opposed to the new health care law.

There's no question payroll taxes are constitutional, because there's no
doubt that the federal government can tax people in order to finance
particular public benefits. But requiring citizens to buy something from a
private company is different because private companies aren't directly
accountable to the public. They're accountable to their owners and their
purpose is to maximize profits. What if they monopolize the market and
charge humongous premiums? (Some already seem to be doing this.)

Even if private health insurers are organized as not-for-profits, there's
still a problem of public accountability. What's to prevent top executives
from being paid small fortunes? (In more than a few cases this is already
happening.)

Moreover, compared to private insurance, Medicare is a great deal. Its
administrative costs are only around 3 percent, while the administrative
costs of private insurers eat up 30 to 40 percent of premiums. Medicare's
costs are even below the 5 percent to 10 percent administrative costs borne
by large companies that self-insure, and under the 11 percent costs of
private plans under Medicare Advantage, the current private-insurance
option under Medicare.

So why not Medicare for all?

Because Republicans have mastered the art of political jujitsu. Their
strategy has been to demonize government and seek to privatize everything
that might otherwise be a public program financed by tax dollars (see Paul
Ryan's plan for turning Medicare into vouchers). Then they go to court and
argue that any mandatory purchase is unconstitutional because it exceeds
the government's authority.

Obama and the Democrats should do the reverse. If the Supreme Court strikes
down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will
swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the
requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they're willing to
remove that requirement - but only if Medicare is available to all,
financed by payroll taxes.

If they did this the public will be behind them -- as will the Supreme
Court. ++

*Activist judges on trial*
E.J. Dionne Jr.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/activist-judges-on-trial/2012/...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/activist-judges-on-trial/2012/...>

Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated
for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an
alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were
members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Senator, excuse me, Justice Samuel Alito quoted Congressional Budget Office
figures on Tuesday to talk about the insurance costs of the young. On
Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts sounded like the House whip in
discussing whether parts of the law could stand if other parts fell. He
noted that without various provisions, Congress “wouldn’t have been able to
put together, cobble together, the votes to get it through.” Tell me again,
was this a courtroom or a lobbyist’s office?

It fell to the court’s liberals — the so-called “judicial activists,”
remember? — to remind their conservative brethren that legislative power is
supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches.

Justice Stephen Breyer noted that some of the issues raised by opponents of
the law were about “the merits of the bill,” a proper concern of Congress,
not the courts. And in arguing for restraint, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked
what was wrong with leaving as much discretion as possible “in the hands of
the people who should be fixing this, not us.” It was nice to be reminded
that we’re a democracy, not a judicial dictatorship.

The conservative justices were obsessed with weird hypotheticals. If the
federal government could make you buy health insurance, might it require
you to buy broccoli, health club memberships, cellphones, burial services
and cars? All of which have nothing to do with an uninsured person getting
expensive treatment that others — often taxpayers — have to pay for.

Liberals should learn from this display that there is no point in catering
to today’s hard-line conservatives. The individual mandate was a
conservative idea that President Obama adopted to preserve the private
market in health insurance rather than move toward a government-financed,
single-payer system. What he got back from conservatives was not gratitude
but charges of socialism — for adopting their own proposal.

The irony is that if the court’s conservatives overthrow the mandate, they
will hasten the arrival of a more government-heavy system. Justice Anthony
Kennedy even hinted that it might be more “honest” if government simply
used “the tax power to raise revenue and to just have a national health
service, single-payer.” Remember those words.

One of the most astonishing arguments came from Roberts, who spoke with
alarm that people would be required to purchase coverage for issues they
might never confront. He specifically cited “pediatric services” and
“maternity services.”

Well, yes, men pay to cover maternity services while women pay for treating
prostate problems. It’s called health insurance. Would it be better to
segregate the insurance market along gender lines?

The court’s right-wing justices seemed to forget that the best argument for
the individual mandate was made in 1989 by a respected conservative, the
Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler.

“If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street,” Butler said,
“Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance. If we find
that he has spent his money on other things rather than insurance, we may
be angry but we will not deny him services — even if that means more
prudent citizens end up paying the tab. A mandate on individuals recognizes
this implicit contract.”

Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to reject the sense of solidarity that Butler
embraced. When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli explained that “we’ve
obligated ourselves so that people get health care,” Scalia replied cooly:
“Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.” Does this mean letting Butler’s
uninsured guy die?

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick called attention to this exchange and was eloquent
in describing its meaning. “This case isn’t so much about freedom from
government-mandated broccoli or gyms,” Lithwick wrote. “It’s about freedom
from our obligations to one another . . . the freedom to ignore the
injured” and to “walk away from those in peril.”

This is what conservative justices will do if they strike down or cripple
the health-care law. And a court that gave us Bush v. Gore and Citizens
United will prove conclusively that it sees no limits on its power, no need
to defer to those elected to make our laws. A Supreme
Court that is supposed to give us justice will instead deliver ideology. ++

*Five Hypocrites and One Bad Plan*
Robert Scheer, Truthdig via HuffPo
03/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/five-hypocrites-and-one-b...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/five-hypocrites-and-one-b...>

The Supreme Court is so full of it. The entire institution, as well as its
sanctimonious judges themselves, reeks of a time-honored hypocrisy steeped
in the arrogance that justice is served by unaccountable elitism.

My problem is not with the Republicans who dominate the court questioning
the obviously flawed individual mandate for the purchasing of
private-sector health insurance but rather with their zeal to limit federal
power only when it threatens to help the most vulnerable. The laughter
noted in the court transcription that greeted the prospect of millions of
the uninsured suddenly being deprived of already extended protection under
the now threatened law was unconscionable. The Republican justices seem
determined to strike down not only the mandate but also the entire package
of accompanying health care rights because of the likelihood that, without
an individual mandate, tax revenue will be needed to extend insurance
coverage to those who cannot afford it.

The conservative justices, in their eagerness to reject all of this much
needed reform, offer the deeply cynical justification that a new Congress
will easily come up with a better plan -- despite decades of congressional
failure to address what is arguably the nation's most pressing issue. In
their passion to embarrass this president, the self-proclaimed
constitutional purists on the court went so far as to equate a mandate to
obtain health care coverage with an unconstitutional deprivation of
freedom; to make the connection they cited the spirit of a document that
once condoned slavery.

These purists have no trouble finding in that same sacred text a license
for the federal government to order the young to wage undeclared wars
abroad, to gut due process and First Amendment protections, and embrace
torture, rendition and assassination, even of U.S. citizens.

Now they hide behind the commerce clause of the Constitution to argue that
the federal government cannot regulate health care coverage because that
violates the sacrosanct principle of states' rights. If the right-wingers
on the high court consistently had a narrow interpretation of federal power
over the economy, there would be logic to the position expressed by the
Republican justices during the last three days of questioning. Of course,
the court's apparent majority on this has shown no such consistency and has
intervened aggressively, as did the justices' ideological predecessors, to
deny the states the power to protect consumers, workers and homeowners
against the greed of large corporations.

We would not be in the midst of the most severe economic meltdown since the
Great Depression had the courts not interpreted the commerce clause as
protecting powerful national corporations from accountability to state
governments. Just look at the difficulty that a coalition of state
attorneys general has faced in attempting to hold the largest banks
responsible for their avarice in the housing disaster.

The modern Supreme Court has allowed the federal government to pre-empt the
states' power to protect homeowners, whose mortgage agreements were
traditionally a matter of local regulation and registration. The court has
no problem accepting Congress' grant of a legal exemption in the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that allows the bundling of home
mortgages into unregulated derivatives.

The court has vitiated the power of the states to control interest rates,
even though quite a few had explicit provisions in their constitutions
banning usury. The result is that loan-sharking by banks that can claim to
be engaged in interstate commerce is constitutionally protected, which is
why there are no limits on mortgage, credit card or personal loan interest
rates.

The sad truth is that President Obama and the Democrats brought this
potential judicial disaster upon themselves. In light of what has been said
this week in the Supreme Court, it seems inevitable that the linchpin of
the 2010 reform -- mandated coverage -- will be thrown out, probably along
with the crucial accompanying reforms. Forget coverage for the young and
those with pre-existing medical conditions. The Democrats will protect
themselves from this reversal by arguing that all they did was copy the
program that this year's prospective Republican presidential candidate
implemented when he was the governor of Massachusetts. Mitt Romney's plan
included the dreaded mandate that he and the Republican justices condemn.

How ironic that Barack Obama's health care agenda would be in a far
stronger legal position had the president stuck by his earlier support of a
public option. Clearly, our federal government has the judicially affirmed
power under our Constitution to use public revenues to provide a needed
public service, be it education, national security, retirement insurance or
health care. Obama's health care reform should have simply extended
Medicare and Medicaid coverage to all who wanted and needed it -- no
individual mandate -- while allowing others to opt out for private
insurance coverage. That's an obvious constitutional solution that even
those die-hard Republican justices would have a difficult time overturning.
++

*Supreme Court Might Decide Their Second Election*
Cenk Uygur, HuffPo
03/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/supreme-court-health-care-la...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/supreme-court-health-care-la...>

*Koch Brothers Behind Efforts to Overturn Health Reform*
Robert Greenwald and Jesse Lava, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/872895/koch_brothers_beh...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/872895/koch_brothers_beh...>

*No Surprise: The Supreme Court Is Hostile to Health Care*
Adam Winkler, Professor of Law, UCLA via HuffPo
03/28/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/supreme-court-health-care-...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/supreme-court-health-care-...>

*Overturning Obamacare Would Make Roberts Court Most Activist, Partisan in
Modern History
*Robert Creamer, HuffPo
03/28/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/overturning-obamacare-wo...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/overturning-obamacare-wo...>

*Are the GOP Justices Political Hacks?*
Robert Parry, Smirking Chimp
March 26, 2012
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/42192/are-the-gop-ju...<mhtml:{DEE0445D-D908-44A0-A6D1-D7699DC78E80}mid://00001370/!x-usc:http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/42192/are-the-gop-ju...>

*“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final
word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than
evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverand Martin Luther King*

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