Hobby Lobby doesn't want to cover its employees' birth control
on company insurance plans. In fact, they're so outraged about women having
access to birth control that they've taken the issue all the way to the Supreme
Court.
I cannot believe that we live in a world where we would even
consider letting some big corporation deny the women who work for it
access to the basic medical tests, treatments or prescriptions that they need
based on vague moral objections.
But here's the scary thing: With
the judges we've got on the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby might actually
win.
The current Supreme Court has headed in a very scary
direction.
Recently, three well-respected legal scholars examined almost
20,000 Supreme Court cases from the last 65 years. They found that the five
conservative justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court are in the top 10
most pro-corporate justices in more than half a century.
And Justices
Samuel Alito and John Roberts? They were number one and number two.
Take
a look at the win rate of the national Chamber of Commerce cases before the
Supreme Court. According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the
Chamber was winning 43% of the cases in participated in during the later years
of the Burger Court, but that shifted to a 56% win-rate under the Rehnquist
Court, and then a 70% win-rate with the Roberts Court.
Follow
these pro-corporate trends to their logical conclusion, and pretty soon you'll
have a Supreme Court that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big
business.
Birth control is at risk in today's case, but we also
need to worry about a lot more.
In
Citizens United, the Supreme
Court unleashed a wave of corporate spending to game the political system and
drown the voices of middle class families.
And right now, the Supreme
Court is considering
McCutcheon v. FEC, a case that could mean the end
of campaign contribution limits – allowing the big guys to buy even more
influence in Washington.
Republicans may prefer a rigged court that gives
their corporate friends and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists every
advantage. But that's not the job of judges. Judges don't sit on the bench to
hand out favors to their political friends.
On days like today, it
matters who is sitting on the Supreme Court. It matters that we have a President
who appoints fair and impartial judges to our courts, and it matters that we
have a Senate who approves them.
We're in this fight because we believe
that we don't run this country for corporations – we run it for
people.
Thank you for being a part of this,
Elizabeth
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