Marble Falls Cyndi Lauper had a big hit with a song called “True Colors,” one of the few that she didn’t write on her big album. The refrain was sticky:
I’ll see your true colors
Shining through
I see your true colors
If you’re paying attention, we’re seeing a lot of folks’ true colors these days on both the US Supreme Court and in the US House of Representatives.
Justice Samuel Alito, Jr. has flown his in front of his main house and beach house with flags in solidarity with the January 6th insurrectionists. I’m not sure why he even bothered to blame his wife, adding incredibility to what other people, even other judges, recognize as blatant stupidity. Alito’s flag waving goes past even partisanship in aligning with these extremists. It’s the equivalent of hoisting a flag supporting Hamas in Israel now.
Alito’s activities and pronouncements in recent years offer no reason to believe this flag nonsense is anything other than his true colors. Coupled with all the recent financial and other outrages involving Justice Clarence Thomas and his hyper-right wife, who was such a cheerleader for the Jan 6th insurrectionists that she was subpoenaed in Congressional hearings about her role in the mess, who can even pretend that the Supreme Court is free of bias? All of this impunity makes the notion of a fair and objective court nothing more than farce. The refusal of these judges to recuse themselves from 2020 election cases in already illegal, but the vaunted separation of powers doesn’t guarantee the political will or backbone to deliver accountability.
Recently, the Republican controlled House of Representatives Appropriations Committee offered a similar example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. The member’s bias against LGBTQ individuals and groups revealed their true colors. In the last session they failed to cut off funding to a couple of nonprofits serving this community, because it was such blatant flag-flying bias. Such support had been proposed through earmarks, the usual “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” horse-trading that Congressman do to give money to special favored projects in their House districts to keep their constituents happy. This time around, they had a plan. They voted to cut off all earmarks to all nonprofits in order to avoid proving discrimination against LGBTQ groups.
Now comes the deluge, with predictable blowback from all the long-favored groups, who will now find their budgets shorn of hundreds of millions of dollars of funding. Trying to hide their hate, they managed to court the whirlwind of mainline nonprofits earmarked in the past by both Democrats and Republicans. We’re talking about Boys and Girls Clubs, veterans’ groups, scouting organizations for both boys and girls, religious nonprofits, workforce training and community development nonprofits, educational groups and more. All of these outfits had tolerated the excesses of their elected representatives and turned a blind eye to their outrages by rationalizing their programs and own needs being supported by these yahoos were more important. Many, if not most of these groups, had policies embedded in their programs against discrimination, including against LGBTQ individuals, but kept quiet while at the trough. Now they are screaming like stuck pigs at the representatives.
At least in this case there is some payback from back home and in the beltway over these true colors display, because these folks are actually elected, guaranteeing some accountability. The lifetime, appointed positions on the Supreme Court have allowed bias and corruption to go unchecked there, making a mockery of the rule of law, and leaving the public few options. What can we do, call Ghostbusters? I don’t think so. We need to demand of our representatives that they do their job and send a message to the court to respect the laws they are sworn to defend and protect.