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Barbara Hausman-Smith of Belfast had a long career as a legal aid lawyer and guardian ad litem.
I’ve been to the Supreme Court before. Forty-four years ago, when we called them the Supremes and I was invited. A year out of law school, I’d filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of my legal aid client, Joan Feenstra. A Louisiana law called Head and Master had allowed her husband to sell their family home out from under her. Together we prevailed in a Supreme Court with seven of the nine justices appointed by Republicans. Unanimously the justices ruled against a system that kept wealth and property in the hands of men to the detriment of women.
Given the record of the Roberts Court, it is doubtful a legal aid client, or any one individual seeking relief, could have their case heard today. That’s why when the court opens for its new term on Monday, I’ll be standing in protest in front of the Supreme Court, wearing the same suit I wore for oral argument in 1980; a one-woman protest by a 76-year-old grandmother.
Here’s why I am doing this: I want to alert Americans to what this majority has taken from us. Most of us don’t want to lose the hard-won protections for clean air and water, the means to keep medicines safe, the confidence in knowing our savings in financial institutions will be secure. More worrying is what I see as the stretch the court employs to interpret the law so that it benefits a wealthy elite.
It looks to me like the court makes their decisions based on legal concepts and facts that have been misrepresented and passed along to them by well funded political action committees. Hence such opinions as Garland v. Cargill where Justice Clarence Thomas used graphics and animation provided by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc. And Justice Neil Gorsuch’s telling mistake in Ohio v. EPA, in which he rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of “nitrous oxide,” or laughing gas, rather than nitrogen oxide, the correct compound. It likely wouldn’t have happened had he gotten his facts from the court record. Yet the majority consistently rules against legitimate established law.
I believe the process of interpreting the law has been infiltrated by — and now protects — a special class of Americans in much the same way Head and Master once did.
My one woman protest is a grandmother’s concern about this term’s majority decisions so thin on the law. It is the only thing I can think of to remind us all of what justice has been and should be.
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