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After last year’s 6 to 3 Dobbs decision by the rightwing U.S. Supreme Court’s supermajority destroyed a half-century of constitutional rights for women to make their own decisions about abortion, the court closed this year’s session with three more radical decisions wiping out decades of equal rights in America.
No one can be surprised anymore by how far the court’s supermajority will go in destroying our constitutional rights. Half of those justices were appointed by Donald Trump who tried to overthrow democracy after he was defeated for re-election.
The other three justices appointed by previous Republican presidents were just as bad. Corrupt rightwing extremist Clarence Thomas left most African Americans without a court advocate after President George H.W. Bush appointed him to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall. Samuel Alito, appointed by the second Bush, wrote the Dobbs decision destroying both women’s rights and religious rights.
Chief Justice John Roberts, also appointed by the younger Bush, pretends to be more moderate, but he’s not. Roberts wrote a concurring opinion saying he would prefer to chip away at women’s abortion rights slowly to avoid a national political backlash, but he joined the supermajority anyway voting to overthrow Roe v. Wade entirely.
Striking Down Affirmative Action
It’s impossible for Roberts to deny his own leadership of the court’s latest cases in which the supermajority destroyed constitutional rights. The most sweeping was abolishing affirmative action programs to expand college and employment opportunities for racial minorities. Affirmative action was first declared constitutional 45 years ago.
Roberts and Thomas have never voted to support affirmative action as justices, but as chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission in 1983 Thomas called equal opportunity laws including affirmative action “critical to minorities and women in this society.”
That was then and this is now. Roberts wrote the supermajority opinion striking down affirmative action proclaiming college students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”
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Roberts was immediately seconded by Thomas making his first public statement from the bench since joining the court in 1991, declaring: “Treating anyone differently based on skin color is oppression.”
Eloquent Dissent
But Thomas’s Whites-pleasing opposition to affirmative action is no longer the last word on the court from an African American. That was an eloquently written dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
Unfortunately, Jackson said, the colorblind society Thomas imagines doesn’t yet exist and most Americans know it. “No one benefits from ignorance … It is no small irony that the judgment the majority hands down today will forestall the end of race-based disparities in this country, making the colorblind world the majority wistfully touts much more difficult to accomplish.”
In an act of partisan sabotage, the court’s supermajority also prevented President Biden from offering the same economic relief to college students struggling for decades to pay off enormous student loans the same low-interest rates or loan forgiveness presidents routinely pass out to banks and multimillion-dollar corporations.
The third major case by the court’s supermajority tried to tweak the hard-won constitutional marriage equality for same-sex couples finally achieved in a 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision in 2015. Roberts, Thomas, Alito and the late Antonin Scalia were the four justices opposing equal rights under the law for LGBTQ Americans.
Backtracking on Civil Rights
ButnRoberts, Thomas and Alito no longer have any power to destroy marriage equality thanks to the political leadership of Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Baldwin was one of the lead sponsors organizing bipartisan votes in the Senate and House codifying marriage equality for same-sex couples in federal law. Biden signed it in December.
With the Supreme Court’s supermajority determined to wipe out laws growing out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s guaranteeing equal rights for all Americans, there are plenty of other constitutional rights we’ve always assumed were safely protected in our democracy that need to be protected the same way.
We’re much closer to doing that than many Americans realize. In the large voter presidential election turnout year of 2024, Biden’s Democrats need only win a few more House and Senate elections to regain control of the House and rewrite the Senate’s filibuster rule.
That would immediately allow Biden and the Democrats to codify into federal law Roe’s reproductive rights for women to control their own lives, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to stop Republican legislatures from restricting voting rights and a ban on mass murderers purchasing military assault rifles capable of firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition within minutes.
It also was a really bad move going into an election year for the Supreme Court’s MAGA Republican supermajority to anger 40 million voters who desperately needed relief from their crushing student loans required to obtain a college education.
