Five Other Legal Things SCOTUS Should Strike Down

Last week the Supreme Court of the United States voided Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, saying that the law no longer applied to the current state of election laws in the country. This suggested that there was some kind of divorce between the mandate of the law—that problematic voting districts with a history of racist vote engineering should be subject any changes in their election law to the Department of Justice for approval—and the “current conditions” in those (and all) voting districts. Apparently it’s not that the presence of Section 4 of VRA stymied racist vote filtering or disenfranchisement, it’s that the country has moved on from its racist past. So if that’s the case, I (tongue in cheek, of course) hereby propose other laws that SCOTUS should feel free to void or strike down because we just don’t need them anymore:

1. The Fair Labor Standards Act—Passed in 1938, this law prohibited child labor and gasp! established a minimum wage as well as hours limits on work. We employ so few children in the United States anymore, it clearly isn’t a problem and SCOTUS should just strike down all of the child labor-related statues.

2. The Clean Air Act—This was such an overblown problem in the US, come on. So we had a few coal plants here and there and no filters on our cars to contain whatever waste they emitted in to the atmosphere. Regulations on air pollution might have been a slight, very not bad problem in 1973 but like, they’re almost nonexistent now. So let’s get rid of this capitalist albatross, SCOTUS. Title 1? Vamos.

3. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—More touchy feely 1970s nonsense! Look at all of the women’s sports teams thriving now, with major leagues in soccer and basketball. Women don’t need these cumbersome Title IX requirements anymore (even if they extend well beyond sports for women). Colleges and universities would totally keep up with women’s sports even without Title IX’s existence. It just plain isn’t necessary in these current conditions. Let’s strike this one, too. We’re post-feminist these days. Just like we’re post-racist.

4. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—Just because banks closed up in the Great Depression along with everybody’s savings, with no promise that they would ever see their money again doesn’t mean we need to worry anymore! We all got through that 2008 global crash just fine. The government shouldn’t be running corporations, anyway. We should trust our banks. Life is full of risk, right?

5. The Second Amendment—Is it just me, or does anyone else notice that we don’t have militias anymore? Also, we have more guns than any other country on the planet. We don’t really need this protection around guns anymore, right? For certainly, if Chief Justice Roberts is going to claim that “current conditions” are different than they were only 50 years ago, can he claim that nothing has significantly changed in the world of guns or our need for guns since 1789? Or maybe we should  just not pay attention to that little gap in Roberts’s logic.