SCOTUS caps Prop 200: Toldya

So in a 7-2 decision the US Supreme Court has ruled that the requirement to show documentation of citizenship to register to vote, installed here a few years ago with Prop 200, is an unconstitutional infringement on federal law and invalid. This is no surprise.

This is exactly what I and many other commentators predicted during the campaign and the period of widespread confusion and angst among voters in the ensuing years. It was as obviously illegal then as now.

Can we hope that the now so-fashionable spending hawks on the right will rise up in anger over the waste of literally millions of public dollars pushing the legislation through, retooling the elections bureaucracy to follow it, and defending it in court against obstructed and justifiably pissed-off voters?

Now that the law has been clarified by what everyone agrees is a conservative-leaning Court, can we hope that the armchair lawyers who proclaim themselves Constitutionalists will power up the criticism machine against the tenthers, birthers and haters of brown people who pushed through this predictably unworkable law?

Let's say I doubt it.

We knew it would be shot down in court, and we said so at the time. We knew it with Arpaio's immigrant sweeps, and with the show-me your-papers provisions of SB1070. We were right, though it takes years for the process to cancel what fear-driven voters did in hours. We knew that the volunteer border militias would wind up killing innocent people in spectacularly awful ways. Shawna Forde and JT Ready proved the point for us.

We knew that Al Gore won more votes in 2000. We knew that the neocons would leverage 9-11 in favor of the military-industrial complex. We knew Afghanistan would be a disaster. We knew Iraq was wrong from the beginning. We knew that the Patriot Act would wind up creating a surveillance/security state, and even its most ardent supporters would come to hate it. We knew the War on Terror would create more enemies than it would ever kill.

We were right, they were wrong. We know we'll never get any credit from the other side for this foresight, and why should we? Every one was as easy to predict as the sun coming up in the morning.

We know that single-payer, non-profit health care is the only sensible and sustainable system. We know that the genetic engineering of food is causing more suffering than it could ever relieve. We know that allowing 1% of the people to own 90% of the wealth is bad for us all. We know that allowing the germ of race distrust to bloom into hate hurts us all. We know that more guns create more violence. We know that human-caused climate change threatens our very existence as a species.

We're right, they're wrong. It's not ideological, it's not elitist, it's just a matter of correct or not correct.
Fact.

When can we get past the debate between the stupid idea and the not-stupid idea, and move on to debating whether doing the smart thing this way or that way is smarter? If the US were a person, we'd be stuck in the third grade, and our college exams are coming very soon.