When Donald Trump led an armed mob to the steps of the Capitol and
urged them to carry out an assault on the electoral process, his efforts
failed in their primary goal of overturning the election and installing
a single, unelected authoritarian ruler.
However, it turns out we
didn’t have to wait for 2024, or even the midterm elections, for
Republicans to have another go at upending democracy. There’s no
question about whether America will get unelected authoritarian
dictators unfettered by either rules or traditions: We now have six of
them.
The idea that the Supreme Court is the final and unchallenged arbiter
of both which laws are valid and how they should be applied was always
extraordinarily dangerous. It endows the U.S. Supreme Court with a level
of control unmatched in the great majority of nations. Like the U.S.
Senate, the Court has long operated on a set of understandings and
traditions that have held in check that inherently unlimited power. And
just as Mitch McConnell demonstrated in the Senate, understandings and
traditions are less than nothing when confronting absolute zealotry and
forthright disdain.
Trump’s coup attempt failed. But the Republicans have found six new
despots who are cheerfully assaulting not just the rights of every
American, but the foundations of democracy. They are unelected. They
answer to no one. They’re there for life. In two weeks they’ve rubbed
out rights that thousands fought and died to obtain over the course of
decades. They have blown away the basis of functional government. They
are erasing not just progress, not only democracy, but America as a
nation—and they’re doing it quickly.
The only thing that makes the U.S. Supreme Court sustainable at all
is the idea that the members will act in good faith to interpret and
apply the law for the benefit of the nation. It has always been the case
that there were Justices and Courts who ignored that constraint to
reflect their own prejudices, or in the name of political expediency.
The Court has made past decisions that were boneheaded in their
foolishness, ghastly in their spitefulness, and also sublime in their
far-reaching vision.
But there has never, in the history of the nation, been anything like what’s happening now.
The current Supreme Court is not interpreting the rules of the
nation. It is redefining the nation: remaking America in the image of a
radical minority over the express wishes and written law of the
majority. It’s not the “Judicial activism” Republicans have fretted over
so long. It’s a Court coup.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade may be the most shocking,
most personal, and most powerful expression of this Court session.
Stripping away a human right held for half a century, and doing so with
not just evident glee, but warnings of more to come, definitely draws
attention. However, it’s genuinely hard to tell if ending Roe
is really the worst thing that the Court has done in the past few weeks.
Maybe that moment came when the Court didn’t just blast apart the wall
between church and state, but annulled its very existence. Maybe it came
when the contrast between the “back to the states” ruling on Roe
and the “you can’t trust the states” ruling on guns made clear that
this Court is not even bothering to pretend to a measure of fairness or
consistency.
As April Siese
reported, the Court also ruled that the Environmental Protection
Agency is no longer empowered to protect the environment. And while
that ruling specifically addressed limits on greenhouse gases, its
consequences are so far reaching it’s not clear that this nation, or any
nation so hobbled, can withstand them. As Justice Kagan
wrote in her dissent, this is a Court that is not operating according
to a good faith interpretation of the Constitution, or to past
understandings of the constraints set on Court actions. Instead, it is
moving toward “goals.”
Today, one of those broader goals makes itself clear: Prevent
agencies from doing important work, even though that is what Congress
directed.
Damn the Constitution, full speed ahead … toward a nation that is,
not figuratively, but literally ungovernable. The ability of regulatory
agencies to investigate or enforce regulations is now not just more
limited, but fundamentally subject to challenge at every step. There is
no regulatory authority—on safety, on housing, on education, on
hiring—that cannot be challenged under the ruling and concurrence on
this case.
That the Court also devoted some time last week to gutting the
protections provided over the past five decades under Miranda, but
allows that you can pick the means by which you are executed
after being falsely accused and convicted, barely seems worth a mention.
Looking beyond just the last couple of weeks, there have been a series
of cases in which this Court made clear that law enforcement agencies
are allowed to operate without respect for constitutional rights.
As Joan McCarter reported
last week, this is a court that has gone rogue. It has blasted out of
the role the Court is supposed to perform in the system and taken on the
dictatorial position of creating a wholly new United States without
even a passing nod to past Court decisions or a pretense of finding
justification within the Constitution. Conservative extremists have been
talking about fighting a “second Civil War,” but it turns out they need
not bother. This Court will give them victory over the majority without
firing a shot.
On Thursday, the Court declared it would take up a case in which the
ruling could allow states to redefine how they conduct elections. As Stephen Wolf
reports, this case could have disastrous consequences. The same
Justices who refused to glance at the relevant text when it came to the Roe
or EPA decisions are likely to crack open that parchment just long
enough to determine that only state legislatures are empowered to set up
district boundaries, lay out how elections are conducted, and determine
the winners.
Nothing the Court has done in the past weeks represents the will of
the majority of Americans or the expression of that will through
Congress. The Court is running roughshod over democracy, and the damage
it has done—not just in Roe, but in a whole series of
cases—constitutes a national emergency that must be addressed if the
United States is going to maintain even a semblance of functional
government.
Unlike most nations, there is very little safety net provided in case
of Court gone wild. In fact, there’s only one practical answer: Expand
the Court.
The only answer to the six red-hot despots now ruling the nation is
to turn them back to what they are in reality—the most extreme voices of
a radical minority. Expanding the Court isn’t just the only hope to
reverse the disastrous ruling on Roe, it’s the last, best hope for America.
This is what happens when Republicans put a token Uncle Tom on the Supreme Court: it's Pubic-Hair-on-the-Coke-Can Clarence who now wants to ban same sex marriage and contraception for married couples, and maybe even interracial marriage even though he himself is married to a traitorous fat white bimbo (but that was then and this is now).
