Time to Unpack the Supreme Court

Unpack

Well folks, it has been a bad day for freedom and the future of our country. While so much attention has gone toward the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first Presidential debate, this risks obscuring the rogue actions of our unhinged Supreme Court.

In just the last few days, the Supreme Court has issued several mind-boggling rulings. Ever since Mitch McConnel packed the court with his norm-busting, SCOTUS has been getting more and more unhinged.

If we ever hold the power again, we need to recognize that those norms are gone and use our statutory authority to unpack the court, add term limits, and narrow the scope of judicial review.

Here is some of the food on display at their poisonous buffet:

The Pro-Death Court

The court delayed deciding a case that addresses whether emergency rooms have to provide emergency abortion care for women in serious danger from their pregnancy. While dodging the case temporarily preserves the right to that emergency care (because of a lower court order), many commentators believe the delay was merely political. By avoiding public blowback and the addition of gruesome stories about women bleeding out in parking lots, the conservatives seem to want to wait to take away the freedom to receive potentially life saving (and certainly disability saving) treatment until sometime after the November election. 

The court struck down the ban on “bump stocks” which make it so a semi-automatic gun can fire at hundreds of rounds per minute because it decided this didn’t count as a “machine gun,” even though even the Trump Administration agreed it was a machine gun.

The Court upheld homelessness bans, even when no shelter is availabl. This was celebrated by our own ghoulish local insurrectionist Ann Davison, our City Attorney. Now people who are so grindingly poor and desperate that they cannot even get shelter can be thrown in jail for it. I guess they are supposed to just, I don’t know, die? For the record, I’d love to remind the theocrats that Jesus basically told the supreme court majority to go to hell 2000 years ago.

Representative Democracy is so 20th Century

The court legalized open corruption by deciding that the federal anti-bribery law passed by congress secretly allows the payment of bribes to officials, as long as those bribes come after the official act that the briber wants done. Where have I heard about this kind of corruption before?

Insurrectionist flag flier Sam Alito wrote for the majority when it took away tens of thousands of black voters’ ability to pick who represents them in congress by upholding a racial gerrymander. The court decided that if a racial gerrymander is for political purposes it’s totally cool. After all, Republicans would be happy to let black voters vote if they voted more Republican! Yay democracy!

Does It Count As Arson if The Supreme Court Lights the Government On Fire?

The court overruled a 40 year precedent that makes it easier for the federal government to function at all, one that congress has relied on for decades when it drafts its statutes. Written by rightwing Justice Scalia, the “Chevron Doctrine'' correctly noted that when statutes are ambiguous, the federal agencies tasked with administering them should have some deference in how they are interpreted, as long as the interpretation is a reasonable one. 

This has given dozens of government agencies with millions of employees the latitude to do things like have experts to weigh in on scientific matters. It is a key source of basic state capacity to do things like keep poison out of our water and air, fraud out of financial transactions, or build infrastructure that actually works. Ironically, as the court made itself the political head of the regulatory state, claiming it is the expert, it had to publicly edit one of its opinions because Justice Gorsuch–in his environmental regulatory expertise–confused an air pollutant with laughing gas. And anyway the courts can’t keep up with their caseload as it is; how are they going to take over the job of the executive branch? It’s just going to make it way easier to tie up basic government function in court forever.

Speaking of assaults on clean air and the regulatory state? The court put a rule from the Environmental Protection Agency on hold that limits pollution in states that do a whole lot of polluting neighboring states’ air. Even conservative Amy Coney Barrett called this one BS.  

In a lesser-noticed opinion, the court also winked and nodded a bunch to let us know that they will likely declare wealth taxes unconstitutional for a reason that would have killed the tax they just said “yes” to. Because if you can accept bribes and take away people’s votes, what’s the big deal with hypocrisy?