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MICRO-PHONIES STOOGE TO CONGA

 

       The 1936 Three Stooges short, “Disorder in the Court” is a classic.  The mayhem includes a talking parrot that escapes and must be caught, a man having his toupee shot, a scandalous dance scene, Moe swallowing a whistle and becoming a human calliope, and half the jury getting knocked unconscious with a gavel.  The courtroom misbehavior of Moe, Larry, and Curly can be forgiven because they were entertainers and comedians.  The zany antics of this trio, even if they had taken place in a real courtroom, would have been far less destructive to life, liberty, and the rule of law than the recent behavior of the highest justices in the land, from whom we expect slightly better behavior.  If Moe replaced Alito, Curly replaced Barrett (Amy Curly Barrett?), and Larry replaced Thomas, there might be more eye pokes and pie fights, but in the long run we would probably get far more decorum, good intentions, and reasonable decisions for the American people.  Unfortunately, there are now six stooges on the court.  We would need to bring back Shemp and Curly Joe to help out, but that would still leave us in need of one more replacement (Benny Hill, perhaps?).

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       To simplify things and avoid the most incendiary topics, this segment is not going to be about the Supreme Court’s jaw-dropping interference in politics or their scandals involving corruption, gifts, criminal lies to Congress, or strong personal biases that should invalidate a justice from serving.  Let’s limit the scope of this rant to (1) the basic problems surrounding the institution itself, (2) some of their more egregious rulings, and (3) a plan for a better way to run our legal system.  

 

       The Supreme Court is created by Congress, which is composed of partisan politicians.  A majority party in control of Congress could add more justices and allow a president to pack the courts, or play games with the appointment procedure.  Just look at how Merrick Garland’s nomination by Obama was ignored for months, ostensibly because it was an election year, but then Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination was rammed through right before the 2020 election.  How is this remotely constitutional?  Most justices to the Supreme Court are nominated based on lists created by extremist think tanks like the Federalist Society, not to create a representative balance, but to dominate the opposition and reshape the political landscape along the most extremist lines.  This is why Barrett’s name immediately came to mind: because she is like a real-life character from The Handmaid’s Tale.  Due to the use of this litmus test, the court has been completely transformed.  Under the guise of interpreting the law, the court has been redefining the role of government based on the radical ideologies of a small minority.  Justices to the Supreme Court are selected by the President, which is far too much power to be invested in a single person.  Supreme Court justices serve for life, which is another huge problem, and the current game is to appoint the youngest, most radical justices possible, so they can push one party’s agenda and control the nation’s culture for as long as possible.  Supreme Court justices can choose to retire when the President belongs to the same the political party they do, ensuring the type of successor they will get on the court.  Moreover, the Supreme Court can select which cases to accept and which to decline, when and how to do this, and what to say or not say about their reasoning or lack of reason.  They can take their own sweet time when it suits them to slow down a process.  They can reframe the question posed by a case to deliberately make it sound more complex than it really is, and then send it back to a lower court to untie the knot that they themselves created.  There is no accountability, oversight, or input from the people of the nation who are forced to live with the outlandish rulings of an institution gone bad.  The way the framers envisioned it, the Supreme Court was supposed to be a council of wise elders who were beyond reproach.  At this point, it has basically lost all credibility with the American people.  The majority of current Supreme Court members are knuckleheads (as Moe would say), and the foul odor of their ill-gotten appointments, lies, lack of conscience, and blatant, holier-than-thou judicial activism has made the institution an embarrassing anachronism from the 1700s.  When it suits them, they adhere to a strict constitutional interpretation, but when that fails to obtain the results they want, they conjure up any other bogus argument that achieves their objectives, no matter how incompatible such an argument may be with the Constitution or the intent of the framers.

 

       Let’s review some of the Supreme Court's most glaring disasters:

 

       Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857 - When asked whether or not Dred Scott and his wife should be declared free because their owner had temporarily resided with them in a free state, the court went above and beyond to show its allegiance to slavery.  Chief Justice Taney, a slave owner from the South, wrote a decision that set the Constitution on its end.  The court ruled that not only had Dred Scott, as an enslaved person, lacked any standing to sue in court, but that slavery was protected everywhere by the Fifth Amendment, which stated that an owner could not be deprived of their property except through due process.  This meant that no law could make slavery illegal anywhere, effectively rendering all free states into slave states.  If only cotton had grown in the North and everyone had accepted this ruling, slavery would have instantly expanded and slavery never would have ended.

 

       The Civil Rights Cases, 1883 - The Supreme Court found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional.  In an incredible feat of mental gymnastics, the court decided that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to private individuals, as all sane people believed, but only to the actions or laws of state governments.  This meant the federal government would allow racial discrimination to continue unabated.  The people who were meant to be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment were now oppressed by it.

 

       Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific, 1886  - The court twisted the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, originally meant for formerly-enslaved African Americans, to grant legal personhood to corporations.  From this point on, businesses have been treated as legal people (with freedom of speech, freedom to use their money to influence political decisions, et cetera), although they are of course not real people and need no legal protection.

 

       Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 - The Supreme Court determined that African-Americans could be subjected to segregation under a so-called “separate but equal” policy, although there was in fact no equality to be found.

 

       Buckner v. Bell, 1927 - The court decided that incompetent people could be forcibly sterilized for the public good.  This ruling encouraged eugenic policies and led to routine sterilization of mental patients and others deemed by the authorities to be undesirable – Native Americans in particular. 

 

       Korematsu v. United States, 1944 - The court found that the internment camps meant to hold Japanese-American citizens during World War Two were legal.

 

       Bush v. Gore,  2000 - In this 5-4 case, the Supreme Court determined the outcome of the presidential election by deliberately depriving thousands of people of their right to have their votes counted on a straightforward ballot.  Notice that Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh were both working on the side of the Bush team.  

 

       Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010 - The Supreme Court ruled that financial contributions to any political candidate, party, or political action committee were a form of speech, and therefore could not be restricted.  This allows the rich to buy campaign ads and exert an unfair influence over an election.  Rather than debate policies in an equal forum, vast amounts of untraceable “dark money” now flood local elections to smother a candidate with negative ads, brainwashing the voters to turn against them.  Some wit observed with a clever play on words: “If money is speech, then speech isn’t free.”

 

       McDonald v. Chicago, 2010 - Although the Second Amendment clearly states that the reason for the right to keep and bear arms is the necessity of “a well-regulated militia,” the court determined that no city can ban individuals from owning guns regardless of their lack of participation in a militia.  Cities with high crime rates are thus stripped of the ability to make reasonable laws to keep guns off the streets.  Through their own creative interpretation of the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court has rewritten it for us.  Since when was that their job?  Doesn’t that require a Constitutional Convention?

 

       Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 2018 - The court ruled that companies can prohibit workers from filing class action lawsuits and require them to enter into arbitration.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the dissenting opinion, calling the decision “egregiously wrong."  She said the ruling would result in “huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the wellbeing of vulnerable workers” because of the difficulty in pursuing claims individually.  She wrote: “By joining hands in litigation, workers can spread the costs of litigation and reduce the risk of employer retaliation.”

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       Rucho v. Common Cause, 2019 - The court determined that any challenge to a state district map on the basis of partisan gerrymandering is a political question and therefore non-actionable by the court.  Roberts said that some amount of partisanship was “inevitable,” although a requirement could easily be made to have computers draw lines that made voting outcomes perfectly match the ratio of party affiliations in a state.  Instead of declaring that citizens cannot be deprived of their right to participate fairly in an election, the Supreme Court passed the buck, essentially condoning gerrymandering.

 

        Shinn v. Ramirez, 2022 - It is illegal for a federal court to consider any evidence that would exonerate a person on death row if that evidence was not introduced due to the incompetence of state-appointed lawyers.  It is now considered better for 100 innocent people to be put to death than to allow one guilty person to go free.

 

       New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, 2022 - In this 6-3 case, the Supreme Court determined that it is the Second Amendment right of citizens to carry a pistol in public.  The idea is that the court should evaluate the regulation not in consideration of the public good, but in light of the “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”  Apparently, Supreme Court decisions do not need to take the public good into consideration.

 

       Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Association, 2022 - To be fair, the lack of congressional legislation granting women the right to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy, at least in the first trimester, is what made the Supreme Court so instrumental in determining the law regarding abortion rights in the first place.  Since the public did not demand it, and Congress did not deliver it, the opinion of the Supreme Court has been pivotal.  The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision granted women the right to decide what to do with their own bodies for the first three months of pregnancy, after which other laws and restrictions could apply, as determined by state governments.  This landmark ruling said that women had a constitutional right to an abortion in the first trimester.  Some two-thirds of Americans were satisfied with this status quo, but the new conservative supermajority was not.  In their ruling, they said that the right to an abortion was not mentioned in the Constitution, nor was it rooted in “the history and tradition of the Nation.”  The notion of “intimate and personal choices” that are “central to personal dignity and autonomy” was dismissed.  They ignored all history and tradition from 1900 onward, and focused instead on earlier laws that outlawed abortion at any stage.  The court’s decision stated, “Without any grounding in the constitutional text, history, or precedent, Roe imposed on the entire country a detailed set of rules for pregnancy divided into trimesters much like those that one might expect to find in a statute or regulation.”  And what is the result of throwing this question back to the states to decide for themselves?  States are arguing over a fair cutoff date beyond which a baby has the right to be born, and often coming up with a deadline of 15 weeks, which is two weeks longer than the length of a trimester as determined by Roe.  Tens of thousands of women in states that banned abortion since the ruling have been forced to travel to receive health care, many lives have been put in jeopardy because laws require that a woman’s life must be in danger before abortive procedures can be enacted, minors have been forced to carry rapists’ children to term, women have been subjected to C-sections to remove dead fetuses so doctors can pretend they were attempting to deliver a live baby (so they can protect themselves legally if prosecuted for breaking the law), and all data indicates that there has been a massive wave of personal and economic suffering as a result.    

 

       Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union No. 174, 2023 - The court upended decades of union policy by ruling that a company can sue a union for damages caused by a strike.  This puts more power in the hands of companies and allows them to threaten unions with punishing fines in addition to their lost wages for exercising their right to go on strike.

 

       303 Creative v. Elenis, 2023 - In this 6-3 decision, the court found that a web site designer had the right to refuse to make web sites for marriages if the couples were gay, because it went against her religious beliefs.  The truly shocking thing about this case is that the court heard it at all.  In order to bring a lawsuit, a person must have standing, but in this case, the web site designer in question had not been sued and she was not doing any work on anyone’s wedding.  She was merely thinking about beginning such work, and felt constrained by the law, so she preemptively sued the state.  Normally such lawsuits are dismissed for lack of standing, which means no one has been harmed and no need for the court to settle any grievance.  It seems abundantly clear that this Supreme Court is on a mission to change culture and is cherry-picking which cases to hear, irrespective of whether or not the litigants even have a right to be in court in the first place.  Justices are supposed to determine the outcome of cases as if holding up balanced scales while wearing blindfolds, like the Greek goddess Themis.  They are not supposed to plan out what acts of judicial activism they intend to perform, then find a case that gives them an excuse to make a ruling they had in mind all along.  It seems their fingers are now in every pie.

 

       Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, 2024 -  The court reversed a lower court’s unanimous decision that the map of South Carolina congressional districts was racially gerrymandered and had to be redrawn.  The court is apparently fine with racist gerrymandering.

 

       Garland v. Cargill, 2024 - In a 6-3 decision, the court decided that the federal government cannot ban bump stocks, devices that turn automatic rifles into machine guns.  The logic behind this is that a bump stock did not literally make a semi automatic into a machine gun, even though the practical function of the device is to do exactly that.  In a country with such severe gun problems as we currently have, where tens of thousands of people die every year from the illegal use of firearms, it is only common sense to ban bump stocks.  To split hairs over the definition of an object based on its construction and not its use or lethality is the kind of abstruse, pedantic exercise that makes sense to dwellers in the clouds, not real people of flesh and blood who have families that need to be protected.  The next time a mass shooting is performed with a bump stock-equipped gun, we will know who to thank.

 

       Department of State v. Muñoz, 2024 - The court decided in a 6-3 decision that citizens who marry foreign spouses do not have the right to sue the government, even for so much as an explanation, when their marriage partners are denied entry into the country.  The majority opinion made it sound as if allowing such official requests for an explanation would be a complete capitulation by the U.S. Government to allow narco-terrorists to enter our country at will through fake or unwise marriages, when no such issue was ever under debate. 

 

       Snyder v. United States, 2024 - In another 6-3 decision, the court decided that prohibitions on rewards and bribery for government officials do not apply if the “gratuity” (we are no longer calling it a bribe, kickback, or payoff) is given after the favor is performed.  In the case in question, the mayor of Portage, Indiana awarded a contract worth millions of dollars to a trucking company and later showed up demanding $15,000 for the favor.  They agreed on a price of $13,000.  When charged with accepting bribes, the mayor unconvincingly claimed he had taken the money as a “consulting fee.”  The mayor was found guilty.  The Supreme Court reversed this decision and found Snyder innocent.  In the majority opinion, Kavanaugh wrote that this $13,000 transfer was basically a tip, no different from a gift card, a lunch, a plaque, a book, a framed photo, etc.  He says that payments must be accepted with “a corrupt state of mind” in order to count as illegal bribery.  This will be a difficult thing to prove in court.  As if the government wasn’t corrupt enough already, now all civil servants have the right to demand and accept “tips” of as-yet-unspecified maximum amounts for doing their jobs, so long as the quid pro quo arrangement is not explicitly stated in writing or on a recording.  The only other rule is that an official cannot legally accept the payments until after services have been rendered.  Yes, paying a public official like a mayor or governor (or president?) a sum of $13,000 for a job well done is no longer frowned upon.  It is basically the same as tipping in a restaurant.  This will definitely not lead to officials auctioning off their services to the entities that promise to kick back the biggest rewards, right?  Is it remotely possible that this pro-gift stance of the conservatives on the court has something to do with Justice Thomas accepting over four million dollars (and Alito taking over $100,000) in gifts from billionaires with interest in the outcomes of cases before the Supreme Court?  In her blistering minority opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson laid bare what a glaring error the court has made with this decision.  She writes that such an “absurd and atextual reading of the statute” that calls payments of up to $13,000 to officials “gratuities” instead of “rewards” is an interpretation that “only today’s Court could love.”  Ouch!  Speaking as the voice of reason, she adds, “Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions. Greed makes governments – at every level – less responsive, less efficient, and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.”  What used to be common sense is now a dissenting opinion: a voice in the wilderness.  If we look into the mirror of history, corruption also played a major, corollary role in the final collapse of the Roman Empire, whose death spiral is looking more like a direct reflection of our current situation.  Relative lack of corruption among public officials is a major reason why the U.S. has normally outperformed other nations economically, but it appears this may no longer be the case. 

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       Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 2024 - In another 6-3 decision, the court overruled the 1984 Chevron decision, which stated that courts should normally defer to federal regulatory agencies in the interpretation of the law.  This grants far more power to corporations and presidentially-appointed federal judges, and takes power away from career professionals at the EPA, FDA, FCC, FAA, SEC, OSHA, and other regulatory agencies.  This is a massive re-allocation of governmental power that will weaken standards for air, water, food, consumer products, transportation safety, and worker safety.  It will open the floodgates to challenges of all regulatory agency policies, to be decided by the whim of each judge, and require clarification by higher courts, including the Supreme Court.  It will turn a relatively stable situation into the Hollywood version of the Old West.  The majority opinion states, "Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities.  Courts do."  Justice Kagan's dissenting opinion states: “a rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. . .  In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue – no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden – involving the meaning of regulatory law.  As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar."  She says that the court's new supermajority “disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”  She is right: this is a brazen power grab that will increase corporate profits but adversely affect the lives of everyone in the country for as long as the ruling stands.

 

       United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, 2024 - When it comes to the argument that presidents have complete immunity, the court could have either summarily affirmed the lower court's unanimous decision and allowed trial to proceed, or, if there was some special reason to do so (which there wasn't), they could have heard the case on an expedited basis and ruled in a matter of days.  Instead, they first refused to take the case on an expedited basis, then accepted it later, and then dragged their feet until the very last day of the session to make their ruling.  In a hearing in May, Justice Alito, in stooping to consider the preposterous notion that a president should have complete immunity and could order the assassination of political opponents with impunity, asked whether or not a president who knew they would be punished after their term in office might just abuse the law even more.  All those working in law enforcement and the judicial system could not believe their ears when they heard this.  By such logic, we might as well abolish all laws so that criminals aren’t pressured to do even worse things because they know they are on their way to jail.  To have a justice on the Supreme Court ask such inane questions is beyond belief.  All reputable legal scholars have pointed out that the court's partisan handling of this case is so transparent that it strains credulity.  On July first, the last day of their session, the court finally ruled that presidents have absolute immunity for official acts but not for unofficial acts, the determination of which are for lower courts to decide.  All they have done is waste six months in order to restate the obvious in a complicated legalese way that makes it nearly impossible to hold anyone in office accountable for the crimes they commit, since crooked office-holders will find ways to claim that their illegal acts were done in conjunction with their official acts (like communicating with other officials), for which they have absolute immunity.  Defenders of the court say this ruling is necessary to prevent presidents from being dragged into court for collateral damage done as a result of policy decisions, but when has this ever happened in the last 250 years?  Not one single time.  There is really no need for this protection.  If Richard Nixon had enjoyed the protection of this court and this ruling, he never would have been forced from office 50 years ago.  If an investigation had begun, he would have successfully stonewalled by claiming that everything he did was part of an "official act."  Why should the President, whose duty is only to see that the laws are faithfully executed, need to be immune from subverting those same laws?  Nixon said, "Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal," and now the Supreme Court has made Nixon's fantasy into fact.  In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote, "Today’s decision . . . reshapes the institution of the Presidency.  It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law."  This unbelievable ruling not only dismantles decades of established protocol, it dismantles the whole constitutional balance and begins a new era of authoritarianism.  This ruling shreds the Constitution.  It was supposed to be a ruling for the ages, but it is not worthy of the stooges.  

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       The court has damaged its own legitimacy to the point of no return.  A plan that sounded good at the Constitutional Convention back in 1787 now looks as well thought-out as the first draft of "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter" from the movie Shakespeare in Love.  When Amy Coney Barrett became a Supreme Court Justice and replaced Ruth Bader Ginsberg in a last-minute rigging prior to the 2020 election, she made a point of declaring that she, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh were not just political hacks.  Subsequent experience has shown that this is exactly what they are, which is not to say that they are any worse than Thomas, Alito, and Roberts.  At the end of 2021, Justice Sotomayor asked the world, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”  Chief Justice Roberts recently chided the critics, saying, “Simply because people disagree with opinions, is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the court,” but a whopping seven out of 10 respondents to a June 2024 AP poll said they believed the court was now guided by ideology.  The three in ten who did not agree with this statement were the ones who obviously do not pay any attention to current events.  How are we supposed to take the court as anything but an embarrassment after such transparent partisanship and lack of professionalism?  The conservatives on the court were picked to be chess pieces in the culture wars, pure and simple.  These self-important robed clowns aren’t even making a pretense of following the Constitution anymore, they are just making things up out of whole cloth.  Unelected civil servants who accept the role of dictator for life as if it is their God-given right and ignore the will of the people run the risk of instigating such sweeping changes that the coveted, privileged positions that they now take for granted might disappear entirely. We are supposed to have three co-equal branches of government, but when the judicial branch is headed by a group of people who, instead of being neutral arbiters as intended, are hand-picked zealots, how can either the Supreme Court or the Constitution survive much longer?  When the highest referees in the country wear the uniform of one political party and openly accept gifts from the billionaire class, it is pretty much game over.  

 

       The entire way in which we conceive of our legislative and judicial processes needs to change.  Early in its history, the Supreme Court claimed the ability to do “judicial review,” which means the court can find a law unconstitutional, even though this power is not mentioned in the Constitution itself.  The fact that a particular law may not be fully compatible with the Constitution (and there is wide room for varying interpretations of this archaic document with its vague wording) does not mean that the original need for the law no longer exists.  By separating the court from the legislative body that creates laws, we have a situation akin to a company with a factory that produces a cell phone and a separate quality control department that does a safety test years later, after millions of products have been sold, and winds up recalling the model entirely.  The need for the cell phone still exists, and of course people have already built their lives around the apps, plugs, and accessories that fit with the devices they have been using.  This causes a huge amount of needless disruption.  Add to that the fact that the quality control department is full of ideologues who are not interested in real-world problems or the needs or opinions of flesh and blood citizens: the ones who do most of the working and living and dying in the country.  The separation of powers that our Constitution provides was a huge improvement over the Age of Kings, but in the computer age there are far better ways of doing things. It was assumed in the late 1700s that there must always be a separation between the public (the rabble) and the elected or appointed elite (assumed to be gentlemen of higher character) who would fill the three branches of government (and rule over us, supposedly making the far-sighted, proper decisions that the rabble itself was not capable of making).  With the technology of today, this continued separation between the governed and those who govern is unnecessary and unwise.  Just as we no longer need politicians to lead us as "constitutional monarchs" in the executive branch, we no longer need fallible, corruptible, and often psychotic Supreme Court justices to decide for us what our own laws mean and how they are to be applied.  The notion that a chief or a king needs a council of "wise men" to make good decisions is so outmoded as to be ridiculous.  The present application of this notion – the assignment of low-caliber ideologues who understand neither the core principles of the law nor the Constitution – amounts to saying that the straw-headed scarecrow had a brain simply because he was handed a diploma by the Wizard of Oz.

 

       Just as a direct democracy would allow us to make laws and policies ourselves by popular vote, we can also modify these laws and policies as problems arise.  When conflicts over the interpretation of laws and policies wind up in court, the final arbiters need not be a panel of appointed judges, but could be a panel of millions of citizens, or hundreds of millions.  The nuts and bolts of how all this would work – how a judge (or referee, or referees) would be arranged and how they would be held to account, or how juries would be selected or open to participation by members of voluntary committees – could all be fine-tuned based on suggestion, discussion, and vote.  If we can use encryption and blockchain technologies to buy cryptocurrencies or do bank transactions with our cell phones, it should be possible to use them (or some other device, with votes tabulated electronically in a verifiable manner) to interpret laws and policies as well.  What we need now is rewriting, editing, and road-testing by citizens who are themselves the lawmakers and adjudicators.  I do not pretend to have all the nuts-and-bolts answers for every particular detail that will arise, but this is impossible for any one person anyway, since it must be an ever-evolving system that responds to the needs of the future in real time.  It is said that two heads are better than one, and in this case it will take all of our collective brain-power to develop a representative, effective, and equitable system and to maintain its operation over the long run.  If we all have a voice in deciding the laws and the application of the laws under which we live, we will not always agree with the decision of the majority, but we will be able to live with these decisions more easily.  We will be comforted by the knowledge that the wishes of all were taken into account, and that in the future, policies might change as people change their minds.  We will no longer be in a situation where six extremists have the power to make a ruling that alienates two-thirds of the citizens of the country (220 million of them), who must then abide by their bad decision.  The fully-democratic judicial system of the future will give power to the people.  It will function more logically and effectively than any previous system.  When looking at the past, later generations will have one main question: why did it take us so incredibly long to figure this out?  We must now look in the mirror and ask ourselves, in the immortal words of Curly Howard, "Is everybody dumb?"

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