Illustration by Michael Burmesch
Supreme Court ballot box illustration
It would be naïve to believe the destruction of democracy by the Trumped-up Supreme Court ended with the abolition of the constitutional right of American women to make their own decisions about their personal lives that was protected for a half-century.
In fact, the radical rightwing court majority has accepted a case for its new session beginning next month that threatens to legalize the failed plot by Donald Trump and his discredited legal advisor John Eastman to overthrow President Biden’s election on January 6.
A decision by the court siding with Republican legislators in North Carolina could allow state legislatures to ignore presidential election results in their states and award electoral votes to any candidate they want. That’s exactly what Trump wanted Republican legislators to do in seven states including Wisconsin that Biden won in 2020.
That decision would literally be the end of American democracy. Before anyone dismisses the likelihood that the Supreme Court could destroy democracy, they should know four of the Republican justices voting to overturn Roe v. Wade—Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have already expressed support for the dubious legal reasoning behind the latest case.
Fringe Legal Theory
Moore v. Harper is seeking to give state legislatures sole authority over election laws in their states. It’s based on a fringe rightwing legal theory that has been advocated for years by a small group of extremists. The so-called “independent state legislature theory” is an exaggerated version of “judicial originalism,” the euphemism popularized by Justice Antonin Scalia to justify rolling back equal rights in our democracy.
Scalia argued judicial decisions should be rooted in the original language of the Constitution written by the founding fathers. Since there were no founding mothers, it’s well known our founders originally granted citizenship rights only to those exactly like themselves—wealthy white males who owned property. It sounds a lot better to call that originalism instead of bigotry and sexism.
|
|
Here’s the original constitutional language rightwing extremists want to use to allow unchecked state legislatures to engage in voter suppression and throw out election results. The elections clause reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” The presidential electors clause says: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.”
Their radical rightwing interpretation leaves out the fact that historically the Supreme Court has always interpreted “Legislature” to refer to each state’s entire lawmaking process, which also includes the veto power of the governor and judicial review of laws by state courts. Similarly, the Constitution’s use of the word “Congress” is interpreted to refer to the entire federal lawmaking process including the president’s veto power and judicial review of laws by the Supreme Court.
Rightwing Supermajority
But, of course, it’s no secret the rightwing supermajority of six Republican justices Trump and Mitch McConnell created on the current Supreme Court has absolutely no qualms about wiping out any constitutional rights or legal interpretations that have ever existed previously.
McConnell as Senate majority leader basically stole two Supreme Court seats that Trump filled. McConnell refused to hold a Senate confirmation hearing for a year to prevent President Obama from replacing Scalia who died in February 2020. Then he rushed through confirmation of rightwing Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg a week before Trump’s defeat.
It doesn’t matter now that the majority of Americans are appalled by the court’s extreme decisions that destroy women’s rights, increase the proliferation of firearms in an age of mass murder and reduce the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to fight climate change threatening life on earth.
Mob Rule
That’s what you get when elected Republicans continue to support their losing president even after he sent an armed mob to violently attack them along with Democrats in Congress to stop them from certifying his election defeat in 2020. The destruction of democracy the former president failed to achieve through bloodshed on January 6 is now continuing in slow motion with Trump’s radical Supreme Court searching for new ways to restrict voting rights and destroy free and fair elections. Destroying more of the freedoms we’ve all taken for granted can only increase public pressure for court reform.
Meanwhile we’re facing a growing threat of more political violence. Trump and other Republican leaders are intentionally inflaming their most violent anti-government supporters to oppose the investigations by the FBI and Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland into Trump’s multiple crimes against democracy.
We’ve already seen where that leads. No legitimate political party in our country should ever encourage the kind of anti-government violence we witnessed on January 6. Silence is complicity. To rejoin America, Republicans have to distance themselves from Trump and rid their party of his violent supporters.
