There have been several seismic moments affecting the national conversation over the past few weeks. Whatever one might have thought about Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, or his sit-down interview with George Stephanopoulos, or the recent attempt of a 20-year-old lunatic to assassinate Donald Trump, or the handing of the presidential baton to Kamala Harris, a number of Supreme Court rulings that rolled down on June 28 and July 1 should scare everyone.
On those days, the Supreme Court of the United States took extraordinary steps to undermine the rule of law, undermine the Constitution, and undermine government oversight by neutering the authority of federal agencies to enforce rules and regulations. As if that weren’t enough, they went on to ensure that Donald Trump, along with future presidents who may be far less than honorable, will never be held to account within the legal system for crimes committed while in office.
Thanks, Supremes. It appears that your prior decisions to deny civil rights to LGBT+ individuals; deny women reproductive autonomy; ensure the disenfranchisement of millions of voters of color; deep-six DEI initiatives and affirmative action on college campuses; obliterate environmental controls; and bring back those old friends of homicidal maniacs—bump stocks—were simply the first course in a much larger judicial bacchanal. You have, for the moment, green-lit an imperial presidency, marching in lockstep with the Heritage Foundation, white Christian nationalists, and a proven autocrat whose future cabinet can now be recast as a cabal of spineless vassals and the rest of us as serfs. Constitution be damned, and full speed ahead.
Recent rulings have declared that the president of the United States should have sole discretion over the Department of Justice, in clear violation of the Separation of Powers clause of the Constitution. We have all had a preview of what that might look like, courtesy of the last Trump presidency. He weaponized the Justice Department against his perceived enemies, and then used it to try to overthrow the results of a free and fair election that he happened to have lost. The Supremes are aiming to transform the highest office in the land into something else entirely, ceding to the unitary executive exclusive power over a separate, formerly coequal branch of government.
Although the Supremes’ transparent effort is to make sure that hard-right Republicans have carte blanche to re-engineer legal, political and social norms in American, they seem unconcerned that Joe Biden now has unlimited authority to ignore the previously established, centuries-old mandate of separation of powers, as will every other president going forward.
Evidently, they haven’t considered that Joe Biden can now commit any old crime in office and not be held to account. Joe Biden is unlikely to take advantage of that new and terrifying ruling, because he is an old-school, moderate traditionalist who has no desire to go down in history as a vicious thug who violated every democratic principle he has ever stood for; Donald Trump, not so much, and who knows what the inclination of other occupants of the White House will be in the future.
I live in hope that this newest, most abhorrent, frontal assault on American democracy will not stand. Women, immigrants, citizens of color, LGBT+ individuals, the elderly, the under-resourced, the disabled, the sick, and those who genuinely embrace the Judeo-Christian values of love, kindness, and inclusion will not sit by and allow the Supreme Court to torch our constitutional democracy.
The justices of Supreme Court, particularly with regard to Justices Thomas and Alito, are no longer bound by the Constitution. They claim either to be “textualists” or “originalists” in their judicial consideration of our laws as written by the founders. There isn’t a whole lot of daylight between those two perspectives, and both schools of thought claim to adhere to the plain text of the constitution as originally intended, and, if an originalist, to interpret that same text according to how an average citizen would have understood it at that time.
It has yet to be revealed how anyone can crawl inside the heads of the people who lived in post-Revolutionary War America, who had an average lifespan of 35 years, as they loaded their muskets, sat at their spinning wheels, churned their butter, hitched their wagons, and beat their slaves. As for how ordinary Americans currently understand the principles of the Constitution as written, the Supremes couldn’t care less.
Alito and Thomas are, in fact, neither textualists nor originalists; they are anarchists who serve not as champions of the rule of law, but as the handmaidens of Harlan Crowe, Leonard Leo, and the Heritage Foundation. They are determined to turn back the hands of time to 1955, and destroy 70 years’ worth of political and social progress for the most marginalized among us.
At least five members of the Supreme Court now more closely resemble Iranian mullahs than American jurists. Their obvious contempt for judicial precedent and the established principles of judicial ethics could not be more clear.
But we can stop them. On his way out the door, Biden has finally decided to try to do something to end their judicial malfeasance, but without both houses of Congress endorsing that effort, it seems like an exercise in futility. But don’t throw in the towel; the American people still have that power, although perhaps not for long. The only way to reign in an out-of-control high court is to vote a straight Democratic ticket this November. I have suggested this before, and now it feels like more of an imperative than ever. A super-majority in both houses of Congress, and a Democratic president, can deflect the most anti-democratic impulses of the Heritage Foundation, and require term limits for Supreme Court justices.
The same super-majority can impeach a number of Supreme Court justices for lying to Congress during their confirmation hearings, feathering their own nests with expensive gifts from their patrons, and violating the bedrock constitutional principle that no man, including the president, is above the law. Should they be convicted—and a super-majority will be able to do exactly that—then they can be removed from the bench. A new court can be reconstituted, legislation can be rewritten to force the recusal of judges who are politically compromised, and mandate the dismissal of judges who prefer to play in the sandbox with their rich buddies rather than commit to the impartial administration of justice.
A super-majority can write solid legislation preserving the environment, the electoral process, voting rights, and women’s rights to reproductive freedom. They can rewrite tax legislation to require the super-rich and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, reinstitute the childcare tax credit, and at long last get assault weapons, and bump stocks, off our streets. They can legislate protections for LGBT+ individuals, and, finally, enact long-overdue reforms to our entirely broken immigration system.
This is our American moment. It is time for us to decide whether we want a corrupt high court to continue to legislate from the bench according to the whims of their politically powerful patrons, and to obliterate human rights, equal rights, the right to an unpolluted environment, and the constitutional requirement for separation of powers.
The mullahs of the Supreme Court can’t destroy our democracy if we don’t let them. We need not allow our constitutional republic to be consigned to the ash heap of history; we can stop them at the ballot box this November.
We can preserve our democracy, if we will only get off our backsides and act to prevent its destruction. We don’t have to allow ourselves to be destroyed by the Supreme Court, the Heritage Foundation, and Donald Trump.
We can put a stop to this insanity.
We can vote.
