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Is SCOTUS Becoming a Defacto Congress? [1]

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Date: 2023-07-07  

The Republican party has unveiled a party trick on America that seems to work more often than not. Famously Karl Rove, known as Bush’s brain, figured out the best defense is to turn logic on its head. Take your opponent’s strength and make it a weakness. One example would be former Senator John Kerry’s war service, transformed into a liability in his presidential run. The use of what may be a perceived power punch by one party can be negated with a bob and weave. In 1987 former President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork went down in flames--partially because he became embroiled in the October 1973 Saturday Night Massacre fifteen years earlier. President Nixon forced the resignation of anyone in the Department of Justice who refused to fire Special Counsel Archibald Cox, the lead investigator into the Watergate Scandal. He found his hitman in Bork, whom Nixon named Acting Attorney General.

From then on, Republicans referred to any unconfirmed GOP-leaning judge as “Borked.” Interestingly, a young Senator discussed five criteria for a Justice, competence, achievement, temperament, conduct on the bench, and personal integrity. That same young Senator said, “advice and consent did imply some restraint.” That Senator was Mitch McConnell, who threw restraint out the window along with his five qualifications with his denial of even a hearing, for now, AG Merrick Garland, and the pushing through of Amy Coney Barret with scant bench experience, and Bret Kavanaugh, whose integrity was certainly called into question. In 2000 the Court, whom Republicans had often decried as legislating from the bench, with the 1973 Roe decision and the 1978 California v. Bakke decision on Affirmative Action, literally superseded the Florida voter and named George W. Bush the winner over Al Gore in the presidential election.

The GOP has achieved its dream of a legislative conservative court through chicanery, theft, and subverting the Constitution by denying (advice and consent) to the nominee of a duly elected President, Barack Obama.

Last Summer, the Court pushed women’s body autonomy into the dustbin of originalism. This year they trampled on the 14th Amendment( guaranteeing equal access) by ruling against the rights of the LGBGTQ+ community in what turned out to be an imagined case. Inexplicably, the Court used the “Major Questions Doctrine” to usurp the Executive and Legislative branches’ power to rule that the administration could not wave student loan debt. Couple that with a capricious or arbitrary end to affirmative action despite the empirical data showing its positive effects, the Court has launched into full-scale lawmaking from the bench.

Next summer, the Court will decide on a gun case that involves the rights of domestic abusers to own gun(s). In February, a 5th Circuit panel struck down a Texas court. Judge Cory Wilson wrote the opinion stating, in the United States v. [Zackey] Rahimi, people with a history of violent abuse of their romantic partners or the partners’ children now have a Second Amendment right to own a gun, even if a court has determined that they are “a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child.” Unlike the Lorie Smith case, which had no basis in fact, the victim of Zackey Rahimi had real bruises. Until 1871 spousal battery was legal. We will see next year if the conservative bench legislators think shooting is a legal replacement for a beating.

Vote Against Guns

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/7/2179691/-Is-SCOTUS-Becoming-a-Defacto-Congress

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