Justice Revisited

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

There are so many areas that we need to improve that the task seems extremely daunting.

We have a president and members of his inner circle who don’t believe in the rule of law. They believe their president can do anything that he wants; that cannot be allowed to be true in a constitutional republic.

Our Constitution was written by people who feared concentrating power into one branch of government—in particular, the executive, whether it was a king or someone with a different title. Therefore, they separated power into three branches of government: the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative.

Additionally, we have to fix the economy so that it works for all Americans. We need a thoughtful, logical immigration system. We can’t randomly scoop people off the street, and at the same time, we can’t let anyone just wander across the border. We need a foreign policy that truly reflects Americans’ ideals. We cannot support Israel if they are going to indiscriminately bomb Palestinians.

We need a CDC that embraces science and rejects conspiracy theories. We need an EPA that fights to protect the environment by embracing climate science and challenging polluters so that we have clean air to breathe and pure water to drink. We need a health care system that serves all Americans and rewards health care providers for delivering state-of-the-art care.

What does all this boil down to? Justice. According to Merriam-Webster, justice is “the maintenance or administration of what is just—that is, what’s fair to all alike. It is the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims. The assignment of merited rewards or punishments. I asked Gemini AI for a definition of justice, and it said, “the principle of moral rightness, equity, and fairness, specifically manifested in the rendering of what is due or merited to individuals.”

In legal terms, there are four pillars of justice: distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative. Distributive focuses on fairness. Procedural fairness is the fairness of the processes used to make decisions. Retributive dictates that punishments be fair and proportionate to the offense committed. Restorative justice emphasizes repairing the harm caused by wrongdoing.

So when we are trying to get our country back on the rails, we need to make sure that justice is served.

January 6th

So a group of guys, they were mostly guys, spurred on by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and others, stormed the Capitol. They chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” as they ransacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. This was an act of insurrection. This was treason.

The Department of Justice performed a painstaking investigation. They tried and convicted some of the low-level henchmen—about 1,600 of them. But justice (retributive or restorative) hasn’t been served. Donald Trump gave all of these traitors to the American Constitution and the American people a pardon, a free pass. Now, he is trying to develop a $1.776 billion slush fund so that he can … do what exactly? Is he going to pay the insurrectionists for raiding the Capitol? No! Not on my watch!

Justice is the maintenance or administration of what is just—that is, what’s fair to all alike.

When the Justice Department took on the Mafia in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, it went out of its way to slowly and methodically build a case from the lower-level thugs all the way up to the bosses. The bosses were the prize. The bosses were the way to take down the Mafia. But with the January 6th insurrectionists, we never had an opportunity to take down the bosses. (Although John Eastman, a Trump lawyer and adviser who egged the insurrectionists on and created schemes to overturn the 2020 election, was fired from his job as a law school dean and then disbarred by the California Bar Association. One out of thousands is small satisfaction.)

How do we take down the rest of them? How do we tie Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Julie Fancelli, who provided funding and buses for the rioters, to the whole January 6th planning? Organizations like Turning Point USA were key in organizing this crime. Shouldn’t we also investigate them?

How do we guard against Donald Trump pardoning himself and denying the American people the justice that we so richly deserve?

Moving Forward

In a way, I hate to say it, but we should thank Donald Trump for reminding us of how precious our democracy is. Many Americans took our democracy for granted. We just thought it would work no matter who was in charge. We found out that that was 100% wrong. We have so much work to do:

We need to fix gerrymandering by passing federal legislation that draws the districts based on federal criteria. We need to take drawing districts out of the hands of states and political parties. We need a Congress that will apply the Constitution’s plain language and clear meaning to the Supreme Court.

Article III (the Judiciary) states in Section 2 that “the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Congress needs to write every new law with exceptions to regulations: that is, the statement that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over this Congressional legislation. Our Constitution puts most of the power of government with Congress, not the President or the Supreme Court.

We need to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which should include a woman’s right to an abortion. At no time should a woman be subordinate to her uterus.

We need to raise the minimum wage so that Americans working a full-time job can make ends meet.

We need an amendment to the Constitution clearly stating that corporations are not citizens of the United States.

We need to expand the Supreme Court. We need to write a code of conduct for the Supreme Court that can be enforced by both Congress and the President. The fact that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito appear to have accepted bribes from wealthy billionaires should be grounds for impeachment.

The Courts need their own Protective Service, which protects judges from threats.

The filibuster must be repealed in the Senate.

This will help us bring justice to the American people.

Education

Correcting our education system will be a massive undertaking. We need to give our K-12 teachers a significant raise. All teachers should have an email address provided by the school. This address should be available to all parents. We want to facilitate two-way communication.

We must teach diversity because when you teach diversity, you learn that not everybody is all good and not everybody is all bad. For example, when you teach students about civil rights and the civil rights movement, you have to cover the March on Selma. This includes the terrible beating by white police officers of protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

You also have to teach that Reverend James Reeb heard Martin Luther King’s call, left his family, and went down to help in Selma, Alabama. He was beaten by a white mob and, unfortunately, died later at a Birmingham hospital. Viola Liuzzo was a white woman from Detroit who wanted to help, so she drove marchers to and from destinations.

She was driving volunteers when members of the Ku Klux Klan chased her down, forced her off the road, shot her in the head, and killed her.

Yes, it is possible to look at the ugly events in Selma and conclude that all white people are bad, but that is a superficial reading of our history. You also need to tell the whole story, including that white people marched arm in arm with Black and Brown people to fight for civil rights. White people were integral to the success of the civil rights movement.

Learning history means teaching the good and the bad to give students a complete picture of our history.

Biden-Harris Campaign

All the major news outlets published a story several weeks ago about the Democratic National Committee releasing a partial report on why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything in this report that is surprising.

Anybody who followed politics even peripherally understood that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had an uphill fight in order to beat Donald Trump. The problem was our economy. Although the economy was improving, most Americans were not feeling good about it, and therefore, any incumbent would have had a difficult time being re-elected.

When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, it was kind of understood that he would run for one term because he was older. Joe Biden was not a young man when he took the presidency. Throughout the last year of his presidency, he made an increasing number of misstatements and gaffes, leading many Americans to worry that he wasn’t as sharp as he used to be. More importantly, many Americans thought he wasn’t as sharp as he needed to be.

Whether that was true or not is not germane; the problem is the perception was out there, and Joe Biden did nothing to reverse the perception that he was “too old” to run for a second term. Joe Biden needed to have a vigorous debate with his advisors about whether he should run for a second term before the primary season started, and unfortunately, that didn’t happen. That mistake basically cost the Democrats a realistic chance of beating Donald Trump in 2024.

When Kamala Harris took over the campaign, it seemed she needed to be everywhere at once, which, of course, is impossible. She needed to be at the big rallies, but also at the small ones. She needed to engage reporters effectively, but that never happened. In her sit-down interviews, she seemed tentative and didn’t anticipate some straightforward questions. A narrative developed that she was afraid to engage with reporters. That was nonsense, and she needed to slap that down vigorously by doing interviews.

She was never able to articulate what she would have done differently if she were president. For example, Joe Biden was extremely vulnerable on border security; Harris never articulated a plan in which she would have been more aggressive at the border. That’s what she needed to say, what the American people wanted to hear. She needed to explain how her views had changed over the past four years. She needed to capitalize on the momentum she got from an excellent debate performance—and on the momentum she got from a fantastic Democratic Convention.

The Harris campaign needed to reach out and solidify the vote with young Black and Brown men. She needed to inject enthusiasm among younger voters. She held a great event at Howard University but also needed to be at the University of Michigan, Penn State, and the University of Arizona (swing states).

She needed to embrace “new” progressive media (which should have been on her radar), by posting on Daily Kos, the most popular progressive blog, and appearing on podcasts on progressive social media like Crooked Media, MeidasTouch, and Young Turks. Weekly appearances there, or at least once a month, would have been an excellent place for her to project her message and rally the base, especially since young people today get most of their news from social media.

Unfortunately, Harris needed to run a perfect campaign to overcome so many issues. Her campaign was good, but not perfect.

The “Conflict” in Iran

Finally, the war in Iran rages on. Some estimates put the cost of the war at around $50 billion so far. Every couple of weeks, Donald Trump says he’s in negotiations with Iran regarding a ceasefire and opening up the Straits of Hormuz, but we just don’t see any progress. Gas prices continue to rise. Grocery prices continue to rise. Oh, and where are the rest of the Epstein files? Why hasn’t anyone gone to jail for not fully releasing the files, as Congress has legislated?

Are you ready to fight for a more just America?

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here, as well as assertions of facts, are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.