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The historic bombshell that lawless U.S. Supreme Court justices dropped on the final day of their term, creating immunity from prosecution for presidents to commit horrible crimes, was so shocking that many of the court’s other terrible decisions immediately faded into the background. That can’t last forever, because many of the most corrupt decisions by the court’s current extreme rightwing Republican supermajority will be a continuing threat to democracy and freedom for most Americans for decades to come.
Here’s how dishonest many of those decisions were. What most Americans thought was a rare victory for reproductive freedom for women—a unanimous decision that refused to outlaw safe and effective abortion pills—does nothing to legalize access to those pills used in more than 60% of all abortions nationally. The anti-abortion Supreme Court supermajority hasn’t retreated. It’s just hiding in the weeds until the presidential election is over as more states restore protections for abortion rights in their state constitutions.
All six Republican justices who abolished a half-century of constitutional abortion rights for women still detest abortion pills because they provide access for millions of women to control their own lives in the privacy of their own homes in Republican states where abortions are banned.
Waiting for the National Ban
That’s why anti-abortion justices are just waiting until the heat is off after the presidential election to find another case in Texas or Louisiana challenging abortion pills so they can ban them nationwide once and for all.
The other most dangerous Supreme Court decision released in the final days that will be affecting all our lives in destructive ways is a boring-sounding decision about government regulation. It was decided by the same lopsided 6-3 extreme rightwing court majority that invented immunity from prosecution for criminal presidents and destroyed 50 years of constitutional rights for women.
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That decision destroys 40 years of legal deference from the court to expert knowledge in creating government regulations. I warned you it sounded boring. Here’s an example to explain just how dangerous that really is. Instead of relying on medical experts to recommend how to save human lives in a pandemic, the court now considers that a political question best left up to politicians even if they come up with incredibly stupid ideas like injecting bleach into human beings to kill a deadly disease.
The title of the 1984 case that led to the Supreme Court’s decision deferring to knowledgeable experts in government regulatory agencies to safely implement laws passed by Congress— Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council—exposes the hot button issue, environmental protection, that began a decades-long crusade by rightwing extremists to demonize relying on scientific and medical expertise to create intelligent government regulations.
Unregulated Chaos
The Supreme Court has now joined those extremists to abolish scientific and medical expertise not only to craft basic environmental protection and safely care for women in high-risk pregnancies but increasingly to prevent the destruction of all life on earth from catastrophic heat, flash floods, droughts, hurricanes and entire seasons of wildfires.
The Supreme Court further demonstrated its hostility toward the Environmental Protection Agency’s protection of breathable air by ending its “good neighbor” program preventing filthy air from power plants and factories from blowing into neighboring states. As usual, the court’s reason to stop the EPA from keeping moving air clean was the cost to the polluting states.
Perhaps the most comical decision by the court’s Republican supermajority was their attempt to somehow pretend there were legitimate legal reasons to keep corrupt politicians like former President Trump out of jail for committing crimes. Among their last major decisions, the six Republican justices threw out the conviction of a corrupt mayor in Portage, Ind., for taking a bribe.
I’m not making this up. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the sentencing of the Portage mayor to two years in prison for accepting a financial kickback of $13,000 from a local trucking company after the city paid $1.1 million for five trash trucks from the company. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the decision arguing that because the mayor took the payoff after the contract was awarded, it wasn’t a bribe. It was a gratuity. He said a bribery conviction “would radically upend gratuities rules” creating a “vague and unfair trap for 19 million state and local officials.”
Justice Jackson’s dissent for the three Democratic appointees called that tortured reading of the bribery statute “one only today’s Court could love.” Never mind that Kavanaugh was claiming there could be 19 million public officials nationwide accepting illegal payoffs for awarding government contracts.
There’s nothing funny about Americans being stuck with an openly corrupt rightwing Republican majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come. The only hope of reforming the court is to elect more Democrats in every House and Senate race. The corrupt, unethical court isn’t going to reform itself and Republicans don’t want to reform our courts. Apparently, Republicans like corrupt courts.
