Day of the Five Riders, 15th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Among the self-evident truths asserted in the foundational document of the United States, its Declaration of Independence, is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Transfer of power is a bottom-up process and the government, up to and very much including the president, gets its power from the people.

In a monarchy, the king or queen has all the power, and the people have only as much power and rights as pleases the monarch. Transfer of power is a top-down affair. The founding fathers of this nation rejected that model and maintained that the people, all people, have certain rights that are inalienable and not dependent on the pleasure or whims of the king. 

In recent decisions, the Supreme Court has exercised a very selective fidelity to this history and tradition of bottom-up transfer of power. In The End of Equity (New York Review), Duncan Hosie claims the court has inverted the traditional balance of equity, with the abstract and imaginary assertions of sovereign injury now outweighing the concrete proof of immediate human suffering. In other words, the Court assumes that it's the president who has certain inalienable rights and that there's no limit on his power, and the president can grant or take away the rights of the governed as he sees fit, presumably for the good of the people, although it's highly questionable who is the actually beneficiary of several recent presidential actions.   

Although the Court has traditionally tried to achieve some degree of equity between the rights of the governed and the powers of the government, it has increasingly become convinced that an imbalance exists between a chief executive denied access to the full powers due to the office, and a people who have become unfairly shielded from those powers. 

For example, last September, in another one of its many unsigned “shadow docket” decisions, this one Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Court authorized immigration officers to detain anyone based on the following factors or combination of factors: 

"(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.” 

As Hosie notes, with that one decision alone, without acknowledgment or justification but with breakneck speed, the Court swept aside decades of Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable seizure and denial of equal protection.

One of the underlying delusions here is that there exists two classes of people. There's one class of law-abiding citizens who are granted (at least for now) some level of protection from unreasonable search and seizure. There's also an assumed separate class of non-citizens, you know, "those people" - the ones you see at bus stops and car washes, that speak Spanish or sound different when they speak English. You know, brown people. Them.            

No person is unequal to or fundamentally different from any other person, not only constitutionally but also existentially. Each of us lives together with all other beings within a network of interdependence, and there is no person that exists outside of that network. Not only is no person separate from all others, each person is, in fact, a part of all other beings. 

This is the basic reality of our lives, although we don’t often see it. As contemporary Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura puts it, we create a personal picture of the world that is biased by our own limited personal experience and other conditions that obscure our objectivity. To take our own personal picture of the world as true reality is delusion. It is delusion because our personal views place us at the center of the universe as the all-important subject, and treat things “other” than us - for example, "those" people - as objects to be manipulated and subjugated. From this view, we desire those things we think will make us secure and prosperous, and reject those things we judge as inferior and undesirable.

Once again. the Supreme Court has it completely wrong. It's not up to the government to decide who has Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and who doesn't. In fact, the rights of individuals aren't derived from the Constitution but are, as the founding fathers put it, inalienable. The Bills of Rights is just an articulation, a recognition, of those rights.

And that's why seven million citizens had to march in the streets on No Kings Day.