majority rules

What if, I thought long ago, maybe when I was in high school, we took everybody whose last name ended in A, and shipped them off to the desert or the north pole or someplace, and all the rest of us divvied up their stuff, and that was that? Well clearly we would have the votes.

Well we would never do such a thing, and I’m sure there are some kind of constitutional guarantees, mostly probably in the Bill of Rights. But I guess we could always pass an amendment. If we made slavery illegal by an amendment I guess we could make it legal again by another.

But of course we would never do that. Unless we changed our minds. Look at the gays. We used to hate them. We made laws against them having sex their way, or being teachers, or being in the army, or, of course marrying. But anymore, we rather like them. Outside of their outrageous behavior on those parades, they are generally neat and clean, and they don’t bring those squalling brats on the bus. Then there were those two charming and amusing fellows on the Will and Grace show.

Anymore most of us like them and the majority rules. Well you can see it in the election of gay friendly candidates, but I have to tell you, even I, a gold star liberal, am a little puzzled by the courts. Back in the bad old days the courts didn’t mind all those anti gay laws, but anymore they are turning them over by the slew. The laws are the same, what’s different?

I guess it’s the people, and I guess public opinion matters, but it makes one a little worried. What if public opinion turned the other way, or turned on somebody else?

I’ve been reading a book, The Brethren, about the Burger supreme court during the Nixon days. Most interesting. I had previously thought that a court was like a computer and you fed facts and laws into it like a bunch of punched cards and pushed the button and it crunched the numbers and out came the answer. Not at all, not at all. A lot of politicking going on in those days, a lot of bargaining between the justices, and what was especially surprising to me was how they were always trying to get unanimous decisions.

They certainly don’t do that anymore. It’s kind of like an election, you have your blue judges and your red judges and two or three swing votes in between, and generally all the big decisions are by a one vote margin.

I should really know more about the supreme court, but it would take more than a weekend on wiki.

Well majority rule, whaddaya gonna do? Tough on the oddball, always has been, nobody likes a party pooper. Even a normal guy, if you asked him what he would do if you made him president, I’ll wager most people would throw up their hands in fear and vow never to let that guy get elected. We make a lot of fun of politicians for their pandering and lying and phoniness, but if they didn’t go through those gyrations they would never have a chance of being elected.

You have to compromise, you have to make deals, if you don’t want to do that you might as well move way the hell out to the woods at the edge of the country and find some other oddball to argue with.

The only way Cambodia was allied with China was maybe when Vietnam invaded them and the Chinese might have been for them because they hated the Vietnamese. Which reminds me of our absurd new lurch into the mideast where we are going to be fighting on the side of Assad and Iran, but will pretend that we are not. Crazy man crazy