About seven years ago I wrote several pieces on Daily Kos about the Republican’s plan to utilize the Senate confirmations process to pack the Judiciary with conservative Federalist Society judges in effort to legislate through the courts. The premise being that they fully understood the demographic composition for national elections was turning against them and if they could just block enough of the Democrat’s picks for judges when they had the Senate to get their conservative ideological judges in the federal court system they could accomplish their policy agenda outside of the normal democratic process.
This way they only needed to have the Presidency every other cycle or so to accomplish this through attrition. Politicians come and go but these judges have lifetime appointments. The back stop I thought would be the Supreme Court. I didn’t in my wildest worse case scenario think that we would see the Judicial malfeasance we witnessed last week where in two cases there was not even a plaintiff with standing or harm demonstrated. With this Supreme court they don’t even need the lower court decisions to fall their way. They can get beat up at every step and still prevail. The keystone case was Citizens United. That decision opened the door for conservative political groups to see the pathway to undermining the established norms and and societal protections. I remember writing a piece titled, “Game Over” when that decision came down. I felt at the time that was the mostly globally dangerous SCOTUS decision of the century. My concerns have been exceeded by reality.
These judges and the decisions from last week have the people who cover this court spooked frankly. They are doing their best to voice their alarm where they have access, but really what more can they say or do? Our system has no exit opportunity for a situation like this other than impeachment. Getting 67 Senators to agree to impeach is not feasible and adding judges seems like an unlikely path for now given the volatility of the current political climate. To say this is a uniquely dangerous situation for our democracy seems like an understatement of fact, but nowadays scenarios like this and the outrage it deserves gets thrown on the pile of all the other craziness that Republicans are generating. It turns out that overwhelming the system is part of the plan too but that deserves its own piece of writing.