Photo Courtesy Flickr CC
It hasn’t been easy for Wisconsin progressives to remain optimistic about politics as they’ve watched their own state government and both houses of the U.S. Congress move to the extreme right.
But progressives never stop believing that decent people actively engaged in politics can bring about positive social change.
And just to show what an incurable optimist I can be, I’m actually starting to think progressives have already won, that the United States is about to embark on a new era of social justice reform.
No, I’m not some kind of dope. The evidence for this shocking assertion is what’s happened to a branch of government that’s been so politically hostile for so long we’d almost given up on it as a force for positive social change.
That’s the United States Supreme Court.
There’s good reason Republicans are in a blind panic over losing conservative control of the Supreme Court right along with their panic about nominating an offensive, unqualified presidential candidate with the highest national disapproval ratings in history.
The reason Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Senate Republicans are frantically blocking President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, a highly qualified federal appeals court judge, to the court is that Republicans already have lost conservative control of the court for the first time since 1971.
That’s right. The Supreme Court has been under conservative Republican control for 45 years, longer than many of today’s voters have been alive.
It began with President Nixon’s appointment of four conservative justices—Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist—before he resigned in disgrace in the Watergate scandal.
Personalities changed, but Republican control never did. Two of the most radical changes came when President Reagan appointed right-wing extremist Antonin Scalia to the court and the first President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas.
|
|
Scalia claimed to be following the “original intent” of the Constitution’s founding fathers, which conveniently harked back to the birth of the nation, when African Americans, women or anyone who wasn’t a wealthy, white, male property owner had no rights.
Bush’s appointment of Thomas, the court’s second African American justice, who replaced civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, was even more outrageous. Thomas consistently voted in lockstep with Scalia in a vicious, right-wing assault on Marshall’s lifelong battle for equal rights and opportunities for African Americans.
Scalia’s sudden death meant the sudden loss of partisan Republican control of the Supreme Court for the first time in nearly half a century. With a year remaining in Obama’s presidency, Senate Republicans did their best to sabotage both the president and the court by refusing to hold hearings on Garland’s nomination.
No one knows how long Republicans will refuse to carry out their constitutional duties. If Democrat Hillary Clinton is elected in November, will they continue to hold off filling any court vacancies for four more years?
That’s why former Sen. Russ Feingold’s defeat of tea party extremist Johnson would be a major step toward winning Democratic control of the Senate and restoring a fully functioning Supreme Court.
Progressive Court Decisions
And another reason for political optimism is that the obstructionist tactics of Senate Republicans have blown up in their faces. Their intent was to paralyze the Supreme Court with 4-4 tie votes so nothing could get done.
But it sure hasn’t worked that way. The effect of ties has been to allow lower court decisions to stand. Because progressive lower court decisions are usually based on legitimate legal interpretations, in most cases that has meant progressive victories.
And without Scalia’s aggressive, right-wing leadership, a surprising number of cases that right-wing Republicans had hoped to use to twist the law to achieve conservative victories have gone exactly the opposite way.
When the current court session began, Republicans were drooling over the possibility of ending affirmative action to reduce racial diversity in higher education, cutting off access to abortion by closing large numbers of clinics with unnecessary restrictions, preventing unions from collecting fees for negotiating better wages and benefits for non-members and even destroying the principle of “one man, one vote” to reduce the voting power of urban districts with large populations of non-voting immigrants and children.
Progressives prevailed in every one of those cases.
And don’t forget, even under Republican control, the Supreme Court has reached landmark decisions legalizing abortion rights, marriage equality and expansion of government-subsidized health care.
Sometimes even Republican-appointed justices do the right thing instead of the Republican thing.
But just imagine what a fully functioning Supreme Court with a democratically appointed progressive majority could do if it exists, oh, let’s say, for the next 45 years.
We appear to be on the brink of securing just such a Supreme Court that could finally outlaw Republican voter suppression tactics, corrupt partisan gerrymandering, billionaires buying elections and other nefarious means used to perpetuate savage inequalities in America.
It’s enough to make anyone start to feel optimistic about our political future.
