Justice Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t have said it better.  Trump’s and McConnell’s packing of the SCOTUS has now successfully destroyed all hope of the judicial branch protecting our Constitution and the rights it enshrines for all Americans.  Yesterday, the court inexplicably allowed Texas’ game playing with legislation to, as Sotomayor accurately described it,

“…the Court’s dangerous departure from its precedents, which establish that federal courts can and should issue relief when a State enacts a law that chills the exercise of a constitutional right and aims to evade judicial review.” and “…the Court effectively invites other States to refine S.B. 8’s model for nullifying federal rights.”

The court left the law in effect, denying a Constitutionally protected personal right for all women in Texas to control what happens to their own bodies.  Gorsuch’s ruling was so badly constructed by his concocted rationalizations that states have now been provided a roadmap for nullifying any Constitutional right they don’t like.

With the court’s ruling, it’s time to now to test this rewriting of US law by turning the tables by legislating private enforcement against other constitutional rights.  How about a law against individual gun ownership?  Example: anyone caught carrying a firearm, whether licensed or not, can be sued by any individual with a minimum $10,000 award to the plaintiff.  How about a law that bans wearing of MAGA hats?  How about personal enforcement by lawsuits against those who discriminate against minorities like LGBTQ individuals, African Americans, and other racial minorities?  The list is endless where states can simply nullify any federally protected individual right by delegating enforcement of laws against those rights to individuals.  Vigilantism can now displace our entire constitutional judicial system and over 200 years of case law that protects it.

The US is inexorably sliding into a post-democracy era where governments are ineffective at protecting personal rights, allowing one class of Americans to force their belief system onto everyone else.  With compromise no longer possible in our political system, aided by the complete disassembly of our court system, the exclusive right to make policy will fall to the party in control.  Texas is the perfect example of this warping of our political system where the governor, aided by the courts and a single party controlled legislature, is now simply a dictator, nullifying local government’s efforts to protect its own citizens through his arbitrary orders while hiding in the governor’s mansion.  He’s now protected not only by non-existence of corruption laws, but by the SCOTUS itself.

Our only hope of blunting this nullification of individual rights is for states like California, New York, Delaware, and others to take advantage of this activist court’s new legislation from the bench by hitting the very people trying to take away our rights by taking away theirs.  How about a law that allows individuals to sue Fox News every time Tucker Carlson tells a lie?  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Let’s hit ’em where it hurts.