A number of commentators in recent years have noted the increasing lack of real-world political experience by Supreme Court judges, but this commentary over at Scotusblog.com hits the point hard:

Many of our greatest Justices came to the Court after substantial involvement in the country’s public life and, frequently, after serving in elective office...The current Court is striking for the absence of even a single Justice with such experience.

Is it possible that the current Court’s rather marked willingness to find constitutional limits on the authority of the Legislative Branch – striking down federal statutes at an unprecedented rate (and limiting State authority as well) – results in part from the fact that no Justice has actual legislative experience?

The result are abstract decisions on everything from racial integration to campaign finance that ignore the give-and-take of democratic debate in favor of abstract principles.

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It was expected but the Supreme Court today dealt a body blow to school integration across the country. Two community plans, one in Seattle and one in Louisville, both used race as a factor in assigning students to some schools as a tool for maintaining integration of their schools. A majority of the Supreme Court decided that schools, however much done in good faith, cannot use race consciousness to achieve integration, even if people know that ignoring race will lead to more racial segregation.

I hate the Court as an institution just because they use supposed high principles to supersede democratic struggle over many tough issues. Sometimes in the past (although rarely in our nation's overall history), they have done this with good intent, but most of the time it has been activism that has set back social change and democratic power. This is one of them.

That said, we should emphasize that states and local governments still have options to fight for racial integration, something the swing decision by Justice Kennedy emphasized.

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Yesterday lefty analyst David Sirota argued that Dems had brought up the Employee Free Choice Act in a perfunctory manner that doomed it to fail in the face of a Senate filibuster. For bills Dems seriously want to pass, they attach it to must-pass legislation, such as when they attached the minimum wage to the Iraq funding bill.

Well, the rightwing Wall Street Journal editoral page agrees with Sirota, writing today that the Dems were obviously not serious in wanting to pass the bill:

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So it seems the Southern Baptists are launching a new ministry in support of immigrants, legal and undocumented, causing great gnashing of teeth by some on the right.:

"We have responsibilities as citizens of the United States and the Kingdom of God," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. "As citizens of God we have an obligation to reach out and try to meet the emotional, physical and spiritual needs of visitors in our midst and that certainly would include people who are illegal aliens."

For those who need a refresher, this is the same Richard Land who anchored the rightwing swing of the Southern Baptists largely into the GOP camp.   So immigration is the wedge issue that just keeps wedging the rightwing into further chaos and division.

The good news is that over thirty states and the federal government raised the minimum wage in recent years. The bad news is that many employers, even most employers in some industries, ignore existing wage and workplace regulations, so the real challenge now is to stop the systematic violation of these laws.

As one more reminder of this enforcement problem, just last week the Brennan Center for Justice released "Unregulated Work in the Global City," a three-year study of broken labor laws across industries ranging from supermarkets to domestic work to home health care to taxis to manufacturing. The Brennan Center study, focused on New York City, reflects trends highlighted in other industry studies, including a U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) study of the nursing industry which found in 2000 that 60% of nursing homes routinely violated overtime, minimum wage, or child labor laws, and a 2004 DOL study of the garment industry which found that 54% of contractors in Los Angeles violated the minimum wage law.

As the Brennan Center highlights and as Progress States detailed in a Stateside Dispatch last year, states can take action to end this systematic illegal employer behavior, but the first step is to take this epidemic of criminal activity by employers as seriously as we do other crimes, most of which are less pervasive.

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