Supreme Court strategy: SCIENCE literacy!

Before we head into a filibuster battle, it's time to consider a new strategy for grilling Supreme Court nominees:  scientific literacy.

 There is no excuse for judges, particularly in the highest court in the land, to be ignorant of basic scientific methods and principles in this day and age.  

And so they should be grilled on their knowledge of the core principles of scientific method: hypothesis formation and testing, probability and statistics, standards of proof; and a certain amont of content in each of the most relevant areas of science and technology: biology, medicine, computer science, and so on.  

Let's start with Alito.  And let's watch the right-wingers and Talibans' heads start exploding like popcorn!

The logic of law is based largely on factual premises:  T is True, therefore L shall be the Law.  But what shall be the standard for provable fact...?   In today's world, the standard of truth is established by science; and very often issues of fact depend on knowledge of technology and engineering.  

When does life begin?  When does life end?  How old is the Earth?... the universe?  Evolution...?  Is the internet a broadcast medium like radio and television?   Is the forensic evidence in a criminal case valid, or is it rigged?

Much of our civil and criminal law is based ultimately on administrative law.  For example the Controlled Substances Act and the FDA's interpretation of same: FDA claims that marijuana has "no medical use," but thousands of critically ill patients, their doctors, (clinical evidence) and the peer-reviewed journals (experimental evidence), say otherwise.  Administrative law judges routinely rule on issues where science, technology, and the facts based thereon, are the direct rationale for various regulations that affect our lives in the most intimate ways.  

Some of the most egregious instances of repressive legislation utilize twisted logic or are blatantly illogical (in the sense of being self-contradictory or premised upon non-sequiturs).   For example the anti-marriage bills claim to "protect" heterosexual marriages by preventing gay people from getting married.  This is a non-sequitur, along the lines of outlawing bicycles in order to protect the long-distance trucking industry.  There is no causal relationship, and none can be demonstrated much less proven.  

Other instances are blatant lies: a Clean Skies Act that will make the skies dirtier than ever.  These types of lies are outright frauds.  

The counter-arguement to my central point here, is that juries decide upon fact, and judges only decide upon matters of law; and the law need not consider issues of fact.  This is BS.  Let's look at some examples....

Hypothetical #1:  Seeking to sidestep "church/state" arguements, the American Taliban manage to pass a law stating that each sperm cell contains a "homunculus," i.e. the seed of a future child, and so therefore, life begins at the moment of the man's ejaculation into the woman's vagina: sewing the seed.  

There is no way to defeat this based on the religion issue, since after all, ejaculation precedes conception as such, and conception is the point upon which fundamentalist ideologies hinge.  And there is no privacy issue here, since the law does not seek to regulate sexual conduct per se, only to establish the point at which life begins.  

So, you don't have an issue of constitutional law.  What you have is an issue of fact: when does life begin?  The Talibans argue it begins at ejaculation into the vagina, the sewing of seed, as it were.  What can you do to reverse this idiocy?  

The only way out is to overturn it based on the fact that science has long disproven the "homunculus" theory of spermatozooa, so the premise for the law is demonstrably false, and the law is therefore invalid.  

Hypothetical #2:  Seeking to sidestep religion issues with creationism, the Talibans manage to pass a law calling for public schools to teach geocentric astronomy: the Sun orbits the Earth, the Earth is the center of the universe.  

Hypothetical #3:  Claiming that since computers emit radio frequency energy, and that any device emitting RF is subject to FCC regulation, the Talibans manage to pass a law placing internet content under FCC regulatory jurisdiction.  

Hypothetical #4:  Claiming that the heart is the center of the soul, without regard to religious denomination, the Talibans manage to pass a law, which they coyly call Terri's Law (after Terri Schiavo) stating that as long as there is a heartbeat, a person is considered alive regardless of whether their brain is flatlined or even largely missing.  

Hypothetical #5:  In 1897 Representative T.I. Record of Posen county introduced House Bill #246 in the Indiana House of Representatives.  This bill attempted to legislate that the value of pi would equal 3.2  There have been other similar attempts in places such as Kansas and Alabama, though the latter may be an urban legend.  But let us just suppose that one of these actually makes it into law.  "Let pi equal three, and so shall it be."  What do you do with that...?  

The way to go after this kind of nonsense is by demonstrating that it is based upon falsehoods, that its logic is circular at best or based on non-sequiturs, that it is simply Not True.  

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So, therefore...

Ask Judge Alito what "p < .001" means.  Ask him a few things about the age of the universe, and the age of the Earth, and of our species on Earth.  Ask him what he knows about the relationship between the human mind and the workings of the brain.  Ask him to define quantum entanglement (yes, I'm serious).  Ask him how the Internet works.  Ask him a few questions about genetic engineering and vaccines.  Ask him about the development of the central nervous system of the fetus.  Ask him to define viruses and bacteria.

And if the guy turns out to be a total ignoramus, we have just gained another arrow to fire off during a filibuster battle.  After all, how are the rightwingers going to defend ignoramus-ism at the level of the Supreme Court?  

And next, let's apply this to the Presidential debates.  Let's get them to work out a math problem or two, on a whiteboard, while we watch.  Let's ask them to operationalise an independent variable in an experiment in any field of their choice.  And so on.    I'm quite serious.  

The best defense against the spread of obscurantism and medievalism is a strong offense.  And this particular strategy strikes the right-wingers in the place where they are weakest.