On the U.S. Supreme Court
—Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican majority have spent decades systematically dismantling the guardrails of American democracy.
Itself the product of unprecedented norm-breaking
—encouraged by a fifty-year special interest campaign designed to weaponize the judicial branch
—it is the Roberts majority that has hastened our endemic institutional collapse.
We can draw a straight line, for example,
from the Roberts Court’s 2010 #Citizens #United decision, which invalidated Congress’s bipartisan campaign finance limits on the farcical premise that independent expenditures could not be corrupting,
to the imminent shadow presidency of erratic mega-billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest outside spender.
Citizens United set the stage for the proliferation of political nonprofits and the establishment of #Super #PACs,
giving oligarchs like Musk a megaphone loud enough to drown out ordinary voters.
The decision turbocharged Trump’s rise, allowing his allies to flood the airwaves with disinformation and propaganda,
meanwhile trapping Democrats in a system of corporate-funded campaigns that has eroded their ability to represent the working class.
Three years later, in #Shelby #County v.#Holder, John Roberts completed his career-long vision quest to dismantle the Voting Rights Act,
invalidating its preclearance requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination.
Erasing the national consensus first achieved in the bloody crucible of the Civil Rights Era
and repeatedly reaffirmed by near-unanimous bipartisan Congresses, Roberts deemed racial discrimination a relic of ancient history,
declaring that “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.”
A flood of Republican state voter suppression laws followed, funded, and orchestrated by the same interests to which Roberts owed his majority.
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned in her searing Shelby County dissent.
But soaking us was the whole point.
The downpour continues.
Final results for the 2024 House elections were tallied recently, and Republicans will owe a razor-thin 220-215 majority to the three seats the GOP flipped thanks to the North Carolina legislature’s brazenly partisan gerrymander,
a move blessed by the Supreme Court’s Republican justices’ 2018 decision in #Rucho v. #Common #Cause.
In that case, the Roberts Court
—so power-hungry that leading legal scholars have dubbed it the “Imperial Court”
—conveniently found that #partisan #gerrymandering,
-- a practice dominated by norms-be-damned Republican state legislatures,
-- presented a “political question” that was outside their purview to resolve.
https://couriernewsroom.com/news/alex-aronson-and-lisa-graves-how-the-roberts-court-eroded-democratic-institutions-and-brought-back-trump/
Science must remain free from political control.
