From the fall of democracy files: The radicalized Supreme Court turns up the heat

The article quoted at length below make these key points about the Supreme Court term that will start tomorrow, Oct, 3:

• The court remains radicalized, anti-democratic, autocratic, Christian fundamentalist theocratic and brass knuckles capitalist. Based on the kinds of cases it chose to hear, it also remains intent on fundamentally transforming secular law into a combination of Christian Sharia and unregulated capitalism. 

• The court is also focused on crippling democracy and shifting power from the federal government and individuals to the Republican Party, the Christian church and businesses, especially big businesses.

• Christian nationalist (CN) dogma is heavily biased against racial minorities, women, non-heterosexuals. In accord with that bias, It is also heavily biased against the civil liberties, e.g., voting rights and voter power, that protect their rights and liberties. In one case tghe Supreme Court is going to decide, CN fundamentalists ask for state government to have unfettered power to use gerrymandering to take as much voter power as possible from racial minorities. 

• Republican Party, CN and radical right capitalist dogma are all rigidly opposed to a strong federal government. Those radical ideologies are just as opposed to the ability of voters to influence the outcomes of elections, and the federal government's ability to protect voter power. One case the court will decide would give state legislatures virtually unlimited power to reduce elections to a mere farce. That case, Moore v. Harper, if decided according to radical right dogma, will turn elections in red states into something fairly close to the fake elections Putin forced on people in annexed parts of Ukraine. Presidential elections in 2024 and thereafter will be rigged farces.

• If decided according to core CN dogma, another Supreme Court case will curtail or completely obliterate rights to same-sex marriage. At best, states will be able to openly discriminate against same-sex couples in commerce and maybe elsewhere. Next and maybe less likely, states would be left to decide the legality of existing and future same-sex marriages. At worst (most unlikely?), all same-sex marriages will be declared unconstitutional, null and void in all states.

This is an urgent warning about how radicalized and anti-democratic the CN movement, the Republican Party and hard core capitalists are. There is no basis for any of them to deny this truth. They might as well claim that the 2020 election was stolen. 

At present, the current Supreme Court can deliver huge enabling powers to all major points of radical CN, capitalist and GOP agendas. There is nothing standing in its way. If the radical right gets its way, (i) secularism will fall to Christian Sharia, (ii) weakly regulated capitalism will fall to barely regulated capitalism, and (iii) democracy will fall to Republican Party autocracy, fundamentalist Christian theocracy and ruthless kleptocracy.

We're in very deep trouble. 

  

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For the wonks, The Guardian writes:

On Monday, the nine justices of the US supreme court will take their seats at the start of a new judicial year, even as the shock waves of the panel’s previous seismic term continue to reverberate across America.

In their first full term that ended in June, the court’s new six-to-three hard-right supermajority astounded the nation by tearing up decades of settled law. They eviscerated the right to an abortion, loosened America’s already lax gun laws, erected roadblocks to combating the climate crisis, and awarded religious groups greater say in public life.

The fallout of the spate of extreme rightwing rulings has shaken public confidence in the political neutrality of the court. A Gallup poll this week found that fewer than half of US adults trust it – a drop of 20 points in just two years and the lowest rating since Gallup began recording the trend in 1972.

Justices have begun to respond to the pressure by sparring openly in public. The Wall Street Journal reported that in recent speeches the liberal justice Elena Kagan has accused her conservative peers of damaging the credibility of the court by embracing Republican causes.

Samuel Alito, who wrote the decision overturning the right to an abortion in Roe v Wade, counter-accused Kagan (whom he did not name) of crossing “an important line” by implying the court was becoming illegitimate.

With so much discord in plain sight, you might have expected the new supermajority created under Trump to opt for a calmer year ahead. No chance.

The choice of cases to be decided in the new term spells full steam ahead. “I see no signs of them slowing down,” said Tara Groves, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

From fundamental aspects of American democracy to LGBTQ+ equality, and the electoral power of racial minorities to protecting the environment, the conservative justices have selected a whole new slew of targets that fall squarely within Republican priorities. The schedule for the first two days of oral arguments this week tells the story.

On Monday morning, the court will fling itself into the thick of environmental controversy in the latest case threatening the ability of the federal government to counter pollution. Having curtailed in June the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to curb emissions causing planet heating, the court will now hear arguments in Sackett v EPA, which has the potential to whittle down the agency’s powers to uphold clean water standards.

Then on Tuesday, the court enters blockbuster territory with Merrill v Milligan. That case could topple the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, which has safeguarded the democratic rights of African American and other minority citizens for the past 57 years.

As Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, put it in a briefing this week, the case adds to the court’s upcoming docket “the raw issue of race in America”.

Merrill v Milligan concerns Alabama, where Republican lawmakers want to draw up congressional district maps that would give Black voters the power to send just one African American member to Congress out of a total of seven representatives, even though Black Alabamans make up a quarter of the state’s population.

In its brief to the supreme court, Alabama effectively invites the conservative justices to make it virtually impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering. Should the state’s view prevail, challengers would have to show that racial discrimination was the primary intent behind how district lines were drawn. [that standard of evidence of intent will be basically impossible to show]

The Alabama dispute epitomizes two visceral themes that run through several of the blockbuster cases this term: race and democracy.

The second major theme of the coming term is democracy. In addition to the Alabama racial gerrymandering case, the court has agreed to take on the highly polarized subject of the role of state legislatures in federal elections.

Moore v Harper could have “monumental implications for American democracy”, Groves believes. At the heart of the case is the debunked “independent state legislature theory”, which has been embraced in recent years by radical Republicans who argue that the constitution gives state legislatures the overriding power to regulate federal elections.

Though legal scholars have largely rejected the doctrine, four of the nine justices – Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas – have paid lip-service to some aspect of it. Should they command the majority, they could give Republican-controlled state legislatures even more firepower to grab what is in effect minority rule through extreme partisan gerrymandering, with very little possible oversight from state courts.

At its most dystopian, an extreme ruling in Moore v Harper could wreak havoc in presidential elections in 2024 and beyond. John Eastman, the conservative law professor mired in legal peril over the central role he played in trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, put the independent state legislature theory at the heart of his notorious memo laying out the roadmap for an electoral coup.

Smith explained that the supreme court could embolden state legislatures to dictate who wins presidential elections in their state according to political whim. “That might be unconstitutional under state law, but under this doctrine state courts would be powerless to prevent them.”

As if race and the future of American democracy were not enough, the conservative justices are also bearing down once again on the right to equal treatment for same-sex couples. They have taken on a case asking whether a graphic design firm, 303 Creative LLC, should be able to turn away gay couples requesting help creating wedding websites on religious grounds.