Exxon Appeals to SCROTUS, Jr.

There are only four Justices on SCOTUS: Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan.  They are frequently outvoted by the five Injustices on SCROTUS: Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy.  Sadly, the Supreme Court is not the only federal court that is overloaded with Republican ideologues for whom corporate greed trumps the US Constitution and the the rule of law.  This may well prevent justice for the victims of corporate sponsored terrorism and murder.

Last month, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reinstated a lawsuit alleging that that members of the Indonesian military hired by Exxon to guard one of its natural gas facilities committed numerous atrocities under Exxon’s employ:

In addition to extrajudicial killings of some of the plaintiffs-appellants’ husbands as part of a “systematic campaign of extermination of the people of Aceh by [d]efendants’ [Indonesian] security forces,” the plaintiffs-appellants were “beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty” amounting to torture, as well as forcibly removed and detained for lengthy periods of time…

…The D.C. Circuit is one of the most conservative courts in the nation, and it includes several of America’s most ideological judges. Judge Janice Rogers Brown once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.” Judge Douglas Ginsburg is an avowed tenther who is most famous for suggesting that the Depression Era vision of the Constitution that struck down everything from the minimum wage to child labor laws is a “Constitution in exile” that should be revived. And Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who dissented from the panel’s decision, believes that Exxon should not be held accountable for atrocities because Exxon is a corporation, and corporations enjoy complete immunity from the international legal norms forbidding such barbaric behavior… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

There is ample evidence that Exxon knew what was happening in their name and did nothing to prevent it, but when Republicans control the courts, having the evidence and the law is no guarantee of success.  Republicans live by the golden rule: the rule that favors those with the gold.

Obama has been able to do little to shift this balance, because Senate Republicans have blocked almost all of his nominees.  However much we have to hold our nose to do so, the only legal way for us to restore the courts to their proper role in government is to keep Democrats in power until Republicans no longer dominate.  That will take a generation.