Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, June 30, 2022

Every Accusation Is A Confession, Supreme Court Edition

 The maxim of "every accusation is a confession" really described the early Trump year and has gone on to be an excellent rule of thumb for understanding Republican talking points.

We can now extend this to the Supreme Court.

For decades, the understanding of the Right, especially religious conservatives, was that the Warren and Berger Courts (and, hell, the Rehnquist Court) had been "lawless," making up rights out of whole cloth. There is no literal "right to privacy" though it is implied by several other parts of the Constitution. That right to privacy undergirds Griswold, Roe, Lawrence and Obergfell. The equal protection clause has been used to endeavor to do exactly what the authors of the XIVth Amendment hoped to accomplish.

However, what the Court is doing now, constitutes an assault on the basic standards of good governance. Dobbs will create a horrifying patchwork of inconsistent and inconsistently applied laws. They have stripped tribal lands of autonomy. Now they are attacking the basic assumption of a regulatory framework that has allowed for public health and safety to advance steadily since the 1960s.

None of this has any real merit under the law. The "reasoning" in Dobbs is terrible and the "reasoning" in West Virginia v EPA is equally horrible.

With a 6-3 majority, the Court is effectively unaccountable to anyone. Even if Alito or Thomas were to drop dead tomorrow, the 5-4 majority would continue to destroy the existing framework of American law.

I honestly have no idea what will reverse this beyond time and continued Democratic victories at the polls.

UPDATE: Jon Chait runs through the difficulty of reforming the Court.

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