September 6, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
For years now, I've been warning about the government's intentional dismantling of every established safeguard in the criminal justice system. The first step was to enact a host of laws turning ordinary, consensual, victimless acts into "crimes" and then slowly eroding civil rights so as to make it easier for the State to arrest, charge, and convict people for these imaginary "crimes". Once there were far too many "criminal" cases for the courts to possibly keep up with, the scene was set for transferring control of the courts from the judicial to the executive branch via "plea bargaining"; some 97% of federal cases and 94% of state cases are now never heard by a jury, and the US cages 5x as many people per capita as more civilized countries do. But still that isn't enough to satisfy the carceral lust of America's ruling fascist establishment, so the process of eliminating the presumption of innocence began; when that proved too slow a process, politicians hit upon the idea of persecuting individuals they wish to destroy with civil suits rather than prosecuting them in criminal courts, because civil suits have a lower burden of proof and may even allow the persecutors to make a profit. The people most often attacked by this sleazy, unconstitutional end-run around due process were of course sex workers, but the tactic still required too much attention from prosecutors and others of their morally-diseased ilk to create the level of carnage desired by authoritarians until some especially-psychopathic individual realized about 4 years ago that a law encouraging any random busybody to file suit for the supposed "offense" would truly open the floodgates. The tactic was incorporated into the awful FOSTA, and the damage that has caused gave authoritarian monsters everywhere paroxysms of joy. So naturally, politicians are already starting to widen the net, and still SCOTUS will do nothing to stop it:
In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to block enforcement of an extreme new abortion restriction in Texas. Notably, it did not rule on the law's constitutionality. If it had, we would likely not be seeing this ban take effect...[because] " S.B. 8 is plainly inconsistent with what the Court has said about constitutional limits on abortion regulations "...The reason the Court declined to temporarily block the law is complicated...[but basically boils down to, it's] because it's not the state tasked with enforcing the law but private citizens in civil court suits...The Court saying that it can't stay a likely unconstitutional law if it's to be enforced by private actors and civil lawsuits could pave the way for all sorts of nutty new legislation...
As I regularly point out, the greatest danger posed by evil laws is often their terrible precedent:
...According to Texas, this...scheme means that the state cannot be hauled into federal court to account for its own law because it has handed over the law's enforcement to private parties...if the Texas scheme actually succeeds in the long run, what's to stop an anti-gun state legislature from banning handguns in the home, in clear violation of SCOTUS precedent, and then placing state officials beyond the reach of federal judicial review by outsourcing the ban's enforcement to an army of private-sector gun control activists? Most gun shops would probably go bankrupt overnight when faced with the wave of private-sector civil suits that such a state law would unleash...
Of course, useful idiots are completely unable to comprehend this simple concept, which means that unless SCOTUS wakes up and does its damned job, we're at the dawn of a surveil-and-snitch state that will make East Germany look like a model of privacy in comparison.
