Well, the radical right-wing Supreme Court has struck again. When Mitch McConnell, Republican Senate leader, refused to give Garland Merrick a hearing after Obama nominated him, saying that eight months before an election was too soon -- and then, six months later, rammed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett -- after the controversial confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh -- I told anyone who would listen that the 6-3 right wing/liberal makeup of the Supreme Court guaranteed right-wing dominance for the next 30 years: legislation involving women, minorities, or labor unions would not get a fair hearing, and corporations and the rich would prevail.
Sure enough. This time, the radical right-wing Supreme Court has ruled in Donald Trump's favor in the matter of the State of Colorado seeking to remove Trump from the presidential ballot in November, on the grounds that he aided in an attempted insurrection.
I don't disagree with that decision; I'd much prefer to see Trump remain on the ticket and be dealt an overwhelming, humiliating defeat at the polls. I think that's what has to happen for the U.S. to cleanse itself of its Trumpist infection.
However, the radical right-wing Supremes went further, as Heather Cox Richardson explained in her March 4, 2024, entry in her "Letters from an American" blog (click here).
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in one concurrence, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in another, note that the majority went beyond what was necessary in this expansion of its decision. “By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson wrote. Seeming to criticize those three of her colleagues as much as the majority, Barrett wrote: “This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency…. [W]ritings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote that “in the course of unnecessarily deciding all of these questions when they were not even presented by the case, the five-Justice majority effectively decided not only that the former president will never be subject to disqualification, but that no person who ever engages in an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States in the future will be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause.”
HCR notes that the embattled Justice Clarence Thomas, under fire for his obvious corruption over the last couple of decades, did not recuse himself, despite the fact that his wife, Ginni Thomas, actively fought in support of the January 6 insurrection. She concludes:
There is, perhaps, a larger story behind the majority’s musings on future congressional actions. Its decision to go beyond what was required to decide a specific question and suggest the boundaries of future legislation pushed it from judicial review into the realm of lawmaking.
For years now, Republicans, especially Republican senators who have turned the previously rarely-used filibuster into a common tool, have stopped Congress from making laws and have instead thrown decision-making to the courts.
Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
Dark days ahead for the U.S. with an illegitimate radical right-wing Supreme Court. There is speculation that if Trump should win in November, radical right-wing "justices" Thomas (age 75) and Alito (soon to turn 74) -- will retire, to be replaced by Trump, presumably by radical right-wingers totally unqualified for the position but chosen because of their age, which will be from 35 to 40, ensuring that they can continue SCOTUS's radical right-wing dominance for another 40 years.
Something must be done. One option is for a Democratic president -- like Biden, for instance -- to appoint at least four more liberal Justices, making the liberal/radical right-wing balance 7-6 (the number of SCOTUS justices has changed over the years -- it's gone from 6 to 5 to 6 to 7 to 9 to 10 to 9 to 8 to 9). And whatever happens, the lifetime appointment must be rescinded. It's totally unfair that since the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Republicans have held the presidency for 12 years and have appointed 5 Supremes; Democrats have held the presidency for 20 years and have appointed 4. There have been a number of formulas suggested for judicial appointments, but I think a good solution is for each president to appoint two Supremes for a term of 12 years, with each new appointment bumping the longest-serving Justice off the court. Not only would that make the balance fair, but a 12-year term would end the incentive to appoint young (and therefore necessarily inexperienced) justices so that they can hang around for 40 years.
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