Today’s six-member ultraconservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court has surrendered all claims to being an impartial moral force for blind justice. Instead, the Republican Party’s small network of corporate and rightwing operatives has painstakingly fabricated and weaponized the court as its own political oligarchy. In only a couple of decades, these anti-democracy zealots, backed by a few billionaires, have incrementally begun imposing on the United States an extremist political agenda that they could not win through the ballot box.
Their eureka moment—the startling development that opened the eyes of moneyed elites and ideologues to the raw power they could grab by politicizing the judiciary—was the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore ruling, widely perceived as illegitimate among liberals and progressives. In December 2000, the five-person Republican majority abruptly crashed Florida’s presidential vote recount, storming over both democracy and judicial propriety to install George W. Bush in the White House. Appalled, dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens mocked the five, pointing out that while their trumped-up ruling didn’t really establish whether Bush or Gore won, it did make the loser “pellucidly clear.” It was, he explained, “the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
One of those who helped run the court’s blatant political power play over the Florida vote was an obscure corporate lawyer who had long been an aggressive, behind-the-scenes Republican pushing to restrict voting by people of color, the poor, and other Democratic constituencies: John Roberts. Shortly thereafter—surprise!—Bush elevated Roberts to a top federal judgeship, and, just two years later, moved him on up to the United States’ ultimate judicial power spot: Chief Justice of the Supremes.
Roberts’ slim Republican majorities have handed down more than eighty partisan rulings, fabricating law that “We the People” have never voted for and don’t support.
From this lofty roost, Roberts has since orchestrated an expansive political docket for the court, handpicking cases created and advanced by far-right interests. He has also manipulated precedents and procedures to produce convoluted decisions that impose plutocratic, autocratic, and theocratic domination over the American people’s democratic rights and aspirations.
To date, Roberts has cobbled together slim Republican majorities to hand down more than eighty blatantly partisan rulings, fabricating law that “We the People” have never voted for and the majority of us don’t support.
It’s bizarre to have the Supreme Court, the least democratic branch of government, professing to speak in the name of “The People,” even as its rightwing core is grinding out an unprecedented level of partisan judgments that most Americans clearly do not want—and will not support. Take the right to abortion, for example, that the court—now freshly packed with Trump’s trio of Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—has nullified. That will be a pricey “victory” for those supposedly “nonpartisan,” black-robed politicos, as they erode public trust of the judicial system by imperiously thrusting their own agenda over the overwhelming will of the people.
Not only has this band of self-righteous judges been punching their reactionary social biases into court-made law, but they’ve also been rubber-stamping cases to enthrone corporate supremacy over us and our environment. Throughout Roberts’s reign, the court has sided with the United States Chamber of Commerce—the chief lobbying group for U.S. corporate giants—a staggering 70 percent of the time. Indeed, three members—Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas—now rank among the five most corporate-friendly justices of the past seventy-five years.
More than six in ten Americans believe that Supreme Court decisions are motivated primarily by politics, not by unbiased readings of the law. The bad reviews have stirred embarrassing outbursts of judicial pique and vitriol. Alito, for example, whined loudly last year that critics are engaged in “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.” Likewise, Barrett was so stung that she felt it necessary to go public with a strained denial, pleading for the public to believe that “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”
Note to petulant judges: If you don’t want to be called a partisan hack, stop being one. And, Brother Alito, it’s not critics who are damaging the third branch “as an independent institution”—it’s your obsequious fealty to corporate interests and your knee-jerk allegiance to extremist ideologues. You can wear the robe, but you can’t hide behind it.