Supreme Silliness

from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland

“Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed.”

–Edgar Allan Poe

Though the Supreme Court must be commended for having the guts to allow so-called “enemy combatants” their day in court this week, they failed to attack the problem where it really lies, that is, in the farcical notion of an executive creating out of whole cloth a new segment of human, neither citizen nor soldier, to do with what he will.

The surprising alliance of Justice Stevens and Justice Scalia to free the enemy combatants immediately on grounds of due process violations comes closest to a reasonable reaction to Bush’s unreasonable actions, and it shows the great scope of American tradition being violated. That they did not prevail shows how far we’ve come from the traditional American value of individual liberty.

But The Court’s actions of last week grate almost as much on the political souls of anyone who, in the words of the president, “love freedom.” One of these supremely obnoxious things was overturning a law that allows aggrieved parties to sue their HMOs for malpractice. From what I gathered from NPR’s usual good coverage of the High Court’s proceedings, the Justices’ reasoning went thus: an HMO’s decisions to supply or deny treatment is an administrative one and not a medical one; therefore, the HMO is exempt from malpractice.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong (and I’m sure you will), but if an attending physician is prevented by your HMO from giving you needed care for your severe athlete’s foot, and you later die of said fungus, is that HMO’s decision not, de facto, a medical one since it curtails a doctor’s ability to treat a medical condition?

And isn’t, therefore, striking down a law that allows suing the HMO in question over your fungal demise basically denying your heirs the right to use the courts to press your claim of poorly practiced medical care? The High Court’s decision seems to shift power to the corporations (in this case HMOs) and away from average citizens – a.k.a. those entities the Constitution was designed to empower and protect.

Likewise, The Court’s ruling that a Nevada man had to supply his name to police in accordance with state law seems pretty much antithetical to the right to remain silent. The Court appears to be interested in not only doing away with Miranda, but in pretty much rolling back any protections average citizens have from not being snooped on by the gubmint*. If the cops, after all, can force you to identify yourself when you’re stopped legally by the side of the road, as in the case of the Nevada man (a “suspicious” circumstance according to the arresting officer), what’s to stop them from shaking you down as you leave a meeting at a union hall or a Green party rally or, for that matter, a mosque? Can’t they decide that all these circumstances are “suspicious” in these harrowing times of embattled conservatism? And if not then, what’s to stop the cops from demanding the identity of, let’s say, a blogger who happens to disagree with American foreign policy?

One wonders, despite recent reasonableness, what sort of America this Supreme Court envisions. This past week suggests one: an America where corporations are über-citizens, able to get away with abuse and neglect if not outright murder with impunity, and one in which individuals have less and less of a right to maintain their status as free people.

* The day after this post, the High Court strengthened the right to remain silent, at least as far as interrogations go, by disallowing the technique of questioning suspects both before and after their Miranda warnings have been read, so my initial reaction was out of line. But the rest of the criticisms stand.