There are times in life when we all fall down - and we admit, we fell down yesterday. As you may have noticed, we have a relatively small staff who also have other day jobs - and those other duties caused us not to publish our expanded daily e-mail edition yesterday. Thankfully, our commentary and cartoons for Tuesday were published through our other channels, so you can view them on the cartoon pages and at our blog site.
Sadly, we weren't the only ones to fall down yesterday. America itself also fell down, or more specifically, the Supreme Court of the United States fell down by failing to uphold justice.
In case you missed it, the highly activist, majority right-wing Supreme Court declared open warfare on minority voters across the nation on Tuesday, by cravenly striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In short, the Court invalidated the ability of the DOJ to use the Voting Rights Act to stop or prevent abuses of voting laws, designed to minimize the participation of young people, poor people, and people of color - all of whom tend to vote heavily Democratic.
Today, the Court is scheduled to release their opinions on both DOMA and the Prop 8 case from California - though frankly, we have strong doubts about the current Court's ability to justly decide anything anymore.
As we've noted previously, it truthfully shouldn't matter who someone makes a legal contract with, so long as both parties in the two-party contract are eligible and amenable to the contract's conditions. Indeed, in a civil marriage contract, eligibility and acquiescence are the only things that matter.
The fact is, if more gay people do get married, it will drive up demand for wedding planners, florists, DJs, bands, and caterers, all of whom we're sure will appreciate the new business.
Regardless of how the Court decides today, the fact remains that the Roberts' Court has done grievous and harmful damage to our collective faith in the American governmental system, with the poor decisions they've already made this term. If the Court is going to simply ignore the massive amount of fact findings in any case, and decide according to whatever the whims of it's members are, then Americans must truly begin to ask how much longer our system of government can last.
Congress - specifically the House - has proven they can no longer pass basic laws.
The Supreme Court has now displayed that it can no longer be trusted to dispense justice fairly.
President Obama is still doing almost everything he can, as he proved with his major policy announcement of actions his administration is taking to fight climate change immediately, without Congress - including the effective temporary denial of the Keystone pipeline. Still, the Executive's chair in the Oval Office only seats one person - and no matter who that individual is, they cannot be expected to handle all of the responsibilities the other two branches of our government cannot seem to handle.
**Service Note** Due to emergency personal and professional issues, we will be taking our annual holiday vacation a bit early, starting tomorrow, June 27, 2013. Throughout our break, fresh cartoons will still be added at PaulFellCartoons.com. Our normal publishing schedule will resume July 8, 2013.
