The scene outside the New York Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan today
before the expected arrival of former president Donald Trump for his fraud trial
NPR reports about cases the USSC is going to hear this term, which is now underway:
Abortion: Abortion is back in court, this time presumably to further obliterate abortion rights. The case comes from the authoritarian radical right (ARR) 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, TX, LA and MI. That court has directly attacked the authority of the FDA to approve the chemical abortion pills, which are now often sold by mail. The pills now account for more than half of all abortions in the US. This is a clear example of creeping authoritarianism and overreach that ARR Christian nationalist judges are feeling empowered to impose God's sacred moral standards on American society.
Gun control: Gun control is back, presumably to for the ARR USSC to obliterate more gun safety laws. This time the law at issue is one that bans gun possession for anyone who's a subject of a domestic violence restraining order. In 2022, the six ARR USSC judges issued a very broad decision declaring that the right to possess and carry a gun is a fundamental constitutional right. In that case, the court said that constitutional laws and regulations about guns have to be analogous to laws on the books at the time of the founding. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that crackpottery which has been used to overturn down various important gun safety laws.
What controls is the meaning of the Constitution at the time the Bill of Rights was written in 1789. in that case, NYSRPA v. Bruen, the text, history, and tradition test (the hopelessness of this cherry picked test for constitutionality is discussed by a gun law expert in this 7-minute video) now governs laws restricting the right to keep and bear arms – invalidating any gun laws that fail to meet its standard. The problem for gun safety laws is that there are many modern situations involving guns that didn't exist in 1789.
In this case, the government defending the federal law, points to what it calls analogous laws in 1789. But that's weak because there weren't domestic violence laws because women didn't have many rights in 1789. They didn't have the vote or property rights, for the most part, and they had little to no recourse under the law from an abusive husband. Given that, one case easily see the ARR USSC striking the law down. That would allow wife beaters to happily buy a gun and shoot her dead at the husband's pleasure. What great fun, go buy a gun!
Context bit: In 2021, I posted about the original research paper that showed gun ownership is a risk factor for domestic homicide. That 1993 paper triggered a ban on federal money for gun violence research in 1996. That ban was still largely in place in 2021. It probably still is mostly in place today.
Killing federal agencies: Another gigantic case the ARR USSC is going to decide deals with how federal agencies are funded. This is another case from the ARR 5th Circuit. The case argues that funding for some major federal agencies is unconstitutional. The case focuses on killing the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, originally proposed by Elizabeth Warren. Brass knuckles capitalist business elites and ARR Republicans hate, hate, hate the CFBP. They want it dead, dead, dead because it protects consumers from capitalist fun and profitable things like price gouging, predatory lending, false advertising and blatant business fraud, which is sometimes conducted on a massive scale.
The 5th Circuit ruled that the Constitution requires an actual appropriation by Congress each year or every other year. And if that is so, if the 5th Circuit is right, it could put not just the CFPB out of business but lots of other agencies, including the Federal Reserve itself and the FDIC, which ensures bank deposits, both of which are funded in similar ways.ELIZABETH WARREN: If this Supreme Court says that Congress doesn't have the power to set up government agencies and laws without going through appropriations, understand not only do all the banking regulators fall on their faces, Social Security and Medicare are now at risk. They don't run through appropriations. They are funded through a separate tax, a separate way to have an agency organized. So the implications of this case - this could echo through the lives of every person in America.
This case could wind up dealing a death blow to many federal agencies, a long-cherished goal of the government-hating ARR Republican Party, brass knuckles capitalist elites and Christian nationalist elites who also hate government and consumer protections. According to CN elites, protecting consumers is God's job, not the government's job.
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Vox writes about the always fun topic of tyranny of the minority in America today:
In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced a [] problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.
The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side ....: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.
“By steering the republic so sharply away from the [monster] of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the [monster] of minority rule,” they write.
This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down an anti-democratic whirlpool.The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.
The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.
These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.
As we all know, it is currently politically impossible to institute significant constitutional reform. It just might be too late for that and for American majoritarian democracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment