Using its Libertarian bona fides to cover for the billionaire benefactors that bought the current, Federalist Society stamped court, through the helping hands of retiring ranking leader of the Senate GOP, Mitch McConnell, and his naked abuse of the public trust in doing their bidding, during both the Obama and Trump administrations, the majority justices in yesterday’s 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Anderson, No. 23-719, pulled their punches in following through on their sworn commitment to defend the Constitution through the rule of law insofar as the Justices can convince the American people of their commitment to that document by demonstrating a lawfulness that doesn’t insult the intelligence of an educated People.
Not entirely unpredictably, they have yet again failed in that endeavor. And that just confirms what many of us have already suspected. This court is bought.
Not all of the justices, to be sure, but enough to make a difference.
However, in this case I’m not letting the ‘liberal’ justices off the hook just yet. After all, the decision to deny the state of Colorado the ability to strike an insurrectionist from its ballot was 9-0. Now, I fully admit to not being a lawyer, but it strikes this citizen that those liberal justices joined the Federalist Society gang in rather conveniently denying — for all future incidents of this type — what both retired judges J. Michael Luttig, Laurence Tribe, and many other jurists, describe as the ‘self-executing’ nature of the 14A. The Reconstructionist Congress of that era wrote nothing in their otherwise carefully crafted statute to indicate the the exercise of Section 3 was dependent on further acts of Congress.
In other words, they expected the SCOTUS to adjudicate claims to Section 3 on the merits rather than as an invitation to second-guess the 14A authors on the manner of its execution based on current interpretations of the federal-state relationship. If a state overreaches in its Section 3 claim, the SCOTUS has the power to deny that claim and explain why, without having to opine on the execution of all future claims. But here, all nine justices signed on to an opinion that gives the Court license to evade its institutional responsibility, to declare “what the law says” based on the evidence (that an entire nation witnessed, and Congress investigated), and instead create a new legislative requirement that turns what is considered self-executing into a legislative dependency. The very same legislature that the 14A authors feared could be influenced by populist sentiment. And the Court does this without giving a clue as to what the Court expects that legislative requirement to contain! How convenient.
Now that we’ve gotten past the particulars of what the SCOTUS has done, let’s zoom out and look at what this all says about the current state of the Court.
We can ask, Who, or What, benefits from this institutional indecisiveness being exhibited by the Court, and even, in some circumstances, being endorsed by its more liberal justices?
It would appear to this citizen, that the current SCOTUS majority, if not also it’s more liberal wing, is less interested in defending the purpose and intent of the constitutional document, than it is in defending the purpose and intent of power. What power? The political power wielded by Wealth, which for American libertarians of a particular stripe, is a proxy for using the amount of taxes paid to the state, as being deserving of a right to determine, if possible, but to influence in any case, how and where the state applies the public purse they feel their rugged Individualism, and ‘hard work’ (not to mention, good fortune) has bequeathed to the nation, as a sufficiently equitable example of democratic capitalism,
So, how does yesterday’s ruling fit into that simplistic and utterly self-serving ideology?
For that, it helps to remember the last time this Court, with a slightly different mix of Leonard Leo-vetted, Federalist Society pinups on the Bench, chose to weigh in on the state’s abuses of federal district apportionment privileges, which determine a state’s slate of federal representatives sent to congress. When coordinated through another Republican donor-funded program, called ‘REDMAP Strategy 2010’ (since updated to ‘2020’), designed to control the federal legislature by maximizing the number of ‘safe seats’ that would be statistically unavailable for Democrats to be competitive in, it becomes a national strategy to cheat the electorate. To deny the nation a congressional representation on the basis of accountability for the spending of the public purse on shared, public, resources, like roads, bridges, schools, libraries, water, and electricity — public assets, aka ‘public utilities’ — determined through a consensus-based process, to be worthy of shared burdens for the sake of a common good. The gerrymandering that was destroying that consensus through the proactive manipulation of federal district boundaries, occurred in the state of North Carolina, in a case called, Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).
The Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principles", the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiablepolitical questions outside the jurisdiction of these courts.
en.m.wikipedia.org/....
Nevermind that the SCOTUS itself is a federal branch of a federal government being misrepresented in the federal legislature of Congress. A 5-4 majority decided that the Court had no business in ensuring those precious ‘democratic principles’ were consistent with an exercise in federal district apportionment that reflected the true ‘will of the People’ enshrined in the federal Constitution.
The Court punted on democracy then, in Rucho, just as they punted on democracy yesterday.
In Rucho, the Court deigned to appear ‘on the side of democracy’ by defining its role as an institution as legally, and purely, interpretive, where judicial judgements would be inappropriate to a ‘political process’ within a legislative function the Court rather conveniently considered outside its institutional purview. Even when it knows that process is electorally illegitimate, and unreflective of a public that is being denied the right to an accountability it’s public institutions were designed to deliver, through the administration of shared public resources, which in turn requires the very legislative legitimacy being actively undermined by a Court unwilling to acknowledge it’s deference to its wealthy benefactors.
In requiring tailored legislation from Congress, the three [dissenting] justices wrote, the majority seemed to be “ruling out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”
www.nytimes.com/...
Yesterday, again, the Court leaned on ‘democracy’ to cover for its own abdication as an institution of the federal government, itself under threat by the apportionment abuses of the Court’s private, billionaire, benefactors. It did this by this by going out of its way to find that the only justiciable application of the 14A, Sec 3, on any public officeholder requires the input of a legislative process the judicial branch itself has corrupted through not-so-benign neglect, and at the behest of the very same libertarian-minded, billionaire benefactors funding Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society, by refusing to exercise it’s constitutional duty to ensure ‘free and fair’ federal representation in the House, has once again demonstrated that it’s a ‘bought Court’.
Again, not all of the justices, but enough of them, to do the damage necessary to bring the republic to the brink of a disaster it very much appears they, and their wealthy benefactors with their private perks, are willing to risk. Tellingly, the majority used ‘democracy’ as an excuse not to adjudicate the decisions reached by the Colorado Supreme Court on the merits, but to instead go beyond the Colorado Court’s decision and lower the intended constitutional bar preventing insurrectionists from returning to power. That is perverse. And their excuse was basically “We’re doing this because we respect and honor a political process (that we’re allowing to be undermined with REDMAP’s apportionment abuse).
Don't call us, we’ll call you, when the electoral system is being undermined.
Perhaps because, for those benefactors, it’s “Heads I win, tails you lose”. They believe their wealth will shield them from the worst of any potential civil unrest their actions and money influence might be responsible for. And for those libertarian-minded, Federalist Society justices? It appears to be the smug satisfaction that comes with an ideological ‘consistency that is the hobgoblin of small minds’. Not to mention living a lifestyle of Wealth without actually possessing it, but feeling like you deserve it. The supposed privilege of serving the public as a Supreme Court Justice in a lifetime sinecure? That just doesn’t cut it for these cosplaying ‘rugged Individualism’, Federalist Society, libertarians anymore. They got theirs, in a morally-challenged, ethical vacuum that manipulated the public into accepting their legitimacy long enough to execute their benefactor’s bidding.
The rest of us can go hang, apparently, as the Court willingly provides an opening for a proven sociopath, benefitting from their tacit endorsement of state-implemented apportionment abuse, to undemocratically dismantle the American state, along with a global democratic order it once stood for.