To: Justice Anthony Kennedy **
From: Coloradans for Benevolent Despotism **
Re: Enough with the Uppity Teabaggers **
(Denver Post, May 29) Tony, can we use first names? You have your dignity to think of, U.S. Supreme Court and all that—but we have a spending racket to sustain, so here goes. Let’s drop the formalities and lay it out candidly. Barring a Wikileak, this won’t be in the papers anyway.
It was a banner week in Colorado for all of us who know what’s good for the public better than the public themselves. With the filing of Herb Fenster’s federal lawsuit to declare the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights unconstitutional, we may see the end of 20 long years of politicians having to ask citizens for permission to tax them. The galling indignity of it all! As a fellow member of the enlightened elite, Mr. Justice, you’ll sympathize.
TABOR, as the tax limit added to our state constitution by voters in 1992 is called, is alleged by wild right-wingers like House Majority Leader Amy Stephens to have protected Colorado from unchecked spending and California-style deficits. Is she delusional? TABOR’s “bad consequences for economic development and education” are notorious, as true Republicans like former Sen. Norma Anderson can attest.
But we both know money isn’t the real issue here. The issue is position and power. Who knows best? Who are today’s philosopher kings? As a judge, you see one every time you look in the mirror. We 34 plaintiffs in the Fenster suit sense in ourselves the same superiority. Why else would the common folk have elected us to state, county, and local offices, school boards, RTD? Born to rule, all of us—weren’t we, Tony?
Never mind if the district court and the appeals court laugh at our looney legal theory that Article IV, Section 4, “guarantee(ing) to every state in this union a republican form of government,” disallows the taxpayer a chance to vote on how much of his hard-earned money the government can take. Eventually it will come before the Supremes. When it does, since you’re the swing vote out of nine, please do the right thing.
Save us from the voters. Please. Deliver us, rescue us, spare us, Mr. Justice, from a miseducated (with too few teachers, overworked, underpaid), misinformed (with too little public broadcasting), stingy, stubborn, selfish, skeptical, bigoted, unwashed, unruly, SUV-driving, Fox-watching, gun-loving, greedy, grasping, holy-rolling, hard-hearted, ditto-headed citizenry who don’t understand that everything belongs to us—except what little we let them keep.
The reason our anointed guild of educators and legislators, incumbents and used-to-be’s, frank Dems and faux GOP, formed Coloradans for Benevolent Despotism is that it has gone really sour between us and the electorate. They no longer do our bidding. Arnold and Maria aren’t more estranged than we and those uppity teabaggers.
We’re not quite saying one man, one vote, one time—the way Mubarak did things—but honestly we’re sick of the sheep having so much control over their own shearing. “One man, one vote, pony up, and shut up for two years,” would suit us fine. Hence Fenster, unsupported though he is by the Founders or case law.
So we’re counting on you, Antoine old buddy. Understand? The high court can be our Seal Team Six in black robes—except we only need five to win. Yourself plus Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor (“wise Latina” is just another way of saying philosopher queen, after all) will stop all this excessive democracy. No more voting on taxes, California here we come, party on, woo hoo!
