The Supreme Court, filled with truly mediocre-minded wannabe conservative Christian clerics, has spent this last session of the court taking away reproductive rights, everybody’s Miranda rights, the separation of church and state in the classroom, and the ability of our government to regulate greenhouse gases that have driven anthropogenic climate change. The one right they have granted Americans is the right for (mostly) white conservative Americans to carry guns virtually anywhere they like, regardless of a state’s position on the matter.
The Court has since announced that it will hear arguments in Moore v. Harper, a North Carolinian GOP attack on fair and democratically drawn redistricting maps. This would allow states the ability to unfairly gerrymander away, regardless of transparent racism and other obvious biases, the majority-rule votes of its constituency. It would take away State Supreme Courts’ abilities to interpret state constitutions—constitutions that usually protect one-person, one-vote democracy.
Rumors float that President Joe Biden is considering nominating anti-abortion Federalist Society member Chad Meredith to a lifetime federal judge position in Kentucky in some handshake deal with Mitch McConnell—a man who historically does not honor handshake deals. This means that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has to once again raise its voice to remind their party what matters: Democracy. Capital “D.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and others have put their metaphorical feet to the pedals and are holding them to the floor.
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On Thursday, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez explained things as clearly as possible on Twitter, writing:
“We are witnessing a judicial coup in process. If the President and Congress do not restrain the Court now, the Court is signaling they will come for the Presidential election next. All our leaders — regardless of party — must recognize this Constitutional crisis for what it is.”
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There is still obvious pushback from the right, and also from what has been called the “center.” Many people, ostensibly Democratic voters, worry that any big moves will scare away conservative voters who just need one reason to finally believe that the Democratic Party is run by commie socialists. Considering how bad the polling is for Biden and Democratic candidates, and has been for quite a while, it is interesting to watch the more conservative members of the party argue that by continuing to do nothing we might have a different result than we have had in the past.
Many will say that Biden’s few days late statement about needing to make a carve-out of the filibuster to codify Roe is a step forward. But if Biden is doing that, after a leak that he was making a deal to appoint an anti-abortion activist judge to a lifetime appointment, and then not openly rescinding that appointment, it makes one wonder what exactly is going on at the head of the Democratic Party right now? I don’t care if Joe Biden is Catholic and sort of doesn’t really care about Roe v. Wade, or has an unsophisticated understanding of what rights are being taken away from about 170 million Americans, he’s supposed to also be a politician at the head of a political party that supports reproductive rights, going into a midterm election cycle that historically hard to get out the base of the party to vote for.
The Moore v. Harper case gives this current Supreme Court a chance to codify a long disputed right-wing “think tank” position that was very recently rejected in 2015 by… the Supreme Court. But that was when Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy supported the majority decision. The fact that the Court has decided to take up the case that would in essence allow minority rule to increase their power over rigging elections, less than 10 years after deciding against it is a clear example of how radically political Justices Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are.
So if you are keeping score: Reproductive rights are something that should only be decided by individual states, but the ability to carry guns everywhere and anywhere is something that states should not be allowed to legislate. And those individual states should also be rigged so that the minority rules and gets to say who has rights and who doesn’t, including the people they would rather not vote. Got it? You can now be considered as full of shit as a Supreme Court Justice!
It is political malfeasance not to fight vociferously for the rights of millions of voters in your political party. It is morally and intellectually bankrupt not to see the Constitutional crisis we are facing.
UPDATE: If this is true…
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