Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of three lone liberals on a Supreme Court with a right-wing supermajority, confessed In a speech last month, “There are days when I come into my office after a case is announced, close the door and cry.”
Friday was surely one of those days. The court issued the latest in what has become its legacy of landmark rulings that shatter generations-old precedents on the rights of women, voters and workers, on gun safety and the environment, on criminal justice and against political corruption. Republican-appointed judges continued to undermine legal cases against Donald Trump for the unprecedented act of attempting to overturn an election, including two judges, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., with conflicts of interest which suggests a clear bias towards him.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
But if Sotomayor cried on Friday, she had company in her misery. Lots of it. Americans across the country — Democrats mostly, but small-time Democrats, too — weren’t so much mourning the new court decisions as suffering from a political hangover: the realization that President Biden’s woeful performance in Thursday night’s presidential debate made it all the more likely that Trump could return to the White House.
And the two things, the court's opinions and the presidential debate, are sadly related.
Biden failed and the judges showed again why voters should consider him The federal judiciary is also on the ballot in 2024, and why they should not again empower Trump to choose judges or give Republicans control of the Senate to confirm them.
After all, Trump has already appointed a third of the Supreme Court, providing the margin that overturned Roe v. Wade, as he had promised in 2016 (and boasted about in the debate). He has also appointed a significant number of lower court judges, including U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who has almost sabotaged the classified government documents case against Trump, and Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas, which attempted to ban abortion medications nationwide.
On Friday, business and anti-government zealots won a victory they had been coveting: the six conservative justices tipped over a 40 year old man unanimous The ruling had established the so-called “Chevron deference” doctrine, which held that when laws are ambiguous, courts must defer to the federal agencies charged by Congress with enforcing them. This revocation is nothing less than a power grab by unelected judges from expert bureaucrats who answer to elected presidents.
It’s impossible to overstate how damaging this ruling will likely be to governance as we know it — specifically to protection against financial fraud and to clean air and water, safe food and medicine, quality health care, workers’ rights, and more. In the liberal dissent, Justice Elena Kagan predicted “large-scale disruption,” just as the court has disrupted health care for pregnant women and the enforcement of gun limits with its precedent-shattering radicalism.
But it’s nearly impossible to get voters to understand or care when the issue is the (boring) government regulatory process and the consequences are hypothetical. You know who cares deeply? The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and right-wing dark money donors for whom overthrowing Chevron and gutting the dreaded “administrative state” was a far higher priority than overturning Roe. The whole cabal worked to that end to get sympathetic deregulators Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett on Trump’s short list of potential nominees and then on to the Supreme Court.
The court's record has made a mockery of Republicans' past demands for “judicial restraint,” which hark back to when the balance of power was more moderate, even progressive. In other decisions Friday, the court held that local governments can Make it a crime for homeless people sleeping in public, and dismissed felony charges of obstructing Congress against hundreds of insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol in 2021.
That also raised questions about two Jan. 6 charges against Trump. But on Monday there will be the court's expected decision on whether Trump, as former president, has legal immunity from the January 6 charges and the classified documents. The judges' delay has already ensured that he will not be tried before the election.
In this sad context of judicial news, almost all the attention was focused on Biden and his failure in the debate to reassure his party and the nation that, at 81, he is fit to serve a second term. Trump demonstrated his inability in other ways on stage: blatantly lying about your financial historyJanuary 6, immigration, election fraud, alleged Democratic support for execution-style abortion of full-term babies, and the appointment of a four-star general witness account Trump called the fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” among others Dozens more falsehoodsHe also dodged repeated questions about whether he would accept the election result this time, no matter who wins.
But what was shocking (after all, Trump no longer shocks) was Biden’s inability to effectively fact-check his rival’s lies, or to make what were often compelling arguments other than with an oddly thin, hoarse voice and an open-mouthed look that screamed “old.” He stopped mid-sentence and finished at one point, bemused by the ringing, with a riddle: “We finally beat Medicare.” Oops.
As expected, Democrats rushed into what former Obama adviser David Plouffe called “a DEFCON-1 moment” minutes into the debate. They continue to mull how to get Biden to step aside (unlikely), whether he could be replaced at the top of the ticket (ditto), and, absent those scenarios, how to limit the damage to Democrats in down votes. .
Friendly pundits have called for Biden to go, and I am sorely tempted to join in, were it not for the impractical and likely counterproductive opening of the Democratic convention in August to elect… who? Many Democrats are not in favor of tapping Vice President Kamala Harris, but snubbing her could be catastrophic in a party that counts Black women as a pillar.
I have been shaken by my cautious optimism that Biden can beat Trump. That scares. The stakes could hardly be higher, perhaps especially for the courts. Judicial appointments are a president's most lasting legacy, as we have already learned from Trump's single term, unfortunately.
@jackiekcalmes
