The golden rule was on full display in Washington, DC yesterday, right across from the Capitol Building, and just down the street from the Library of Congress - but it may not be the golden rule you're thinking of.
In case you missed it, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday made a decision to throw out a long-struggling, class action employment discrimination lawsuit against the country's largest retailer, Wal-Mart. The decision was not the slam dunk that media outlets on either side are claiming it was.
The court was unanimous in saying that the lawyers for the plaintiffs had sued Wal-Mart using the wrong part of the law, one not concerned with monetary damages. That's the part of the story you'll hear crowed about in the right-wing media, when it comes to this story. Sadly, it was the failure of the lawyers for the former Wal-Mart workers to properly navigate the labyrinth of legal tangles that led to that 9-0 decision - which had nothing to do with the key part of the case.
The real meat of the decision was the 5-4 ideological split, which said - in short - that class-action lawsuits that seek money from employers for discrimination in the workplace are non-starters in the eyes of the Supremes.
As Columbia University law professor John Coffee said in the LA Times, this ruling "… largely eliminates the monetary threat facing big employers [if they decide to discriminate]… if there is no money relief at the end of the road, there is no incentive to bring the suit."
We've understood for quite some time now that the Roberts Court has been overly friendly to corporations, big businesses, and the wealthy, while treating the concerns of those the court is supposed to focus upon - the unjustly afflicted or unjustly accused - as annoying, uninteresting, or unworthy of justice.
Just to add insult to their injury to the justice system, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court also ruled, in a separate case, that states have no duty to provide legal counsel in civil court matters, "even if that individual faces incarceration," due to the circumstances of their situation.
This can - and likely will - open a huge can of worms for certain people caught in the gears of our legal system. Those people, once accused and arrested, if caught in the system, could then be punished not for their own failures but the failures of the system. Each time the system fails them, they - not the system - could be given an additional charge, but they won't be provided with legal counsel any more.
As the bipartisan Constitution Project noted Monday, the ruling "undermines the fundamental fairness of our justice system, putting Americans in danger of losing their liberty simply because they cannot afford a lawyer."
If this sounds eerily close to the skewed legal system Europeans often faced under unjust kings and other aristocratic rulers - one of the very reasons Europeans escaped to America in the first place - you're right.
The golden rule that we mentioned earlier, that the U.S. Supreme Court was displaying Monday, isn't the one in the Bible.
It's the rule that he or she who has the gold, makes the rules.
As history proves, that rule often works, for a time. As history also proves, that rule only works as long as they who have the gold can stay alive long enough to use it.
That version of the golden rule may be what our legal system is turning into - but don't call it a justice system.
Justice doesn't look anything like this.
