Outrage Fatigue will lose this democracy
It's not just the Senate Invertebrate Committee; the majority of the country is wussing out
Anger? Moi? I don’t know how to say it better than my betters today. PLEASE READ THE LINKS TODAY.
SCOTUS analyst Dahlia Lithwick scorches the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And rightly so. I think the problem is some of them are just too old and mostly too privileged. They don’t feel these threats directly and tut-tutting isn’t gonna protect any of us.
Heather Cox Richardson brings added historical perspective to the threat unfolding. Abortion, contraception, interracial marriage, desegregated schools, LGBTQ rights and more are under attack. When she mentions Mann and Ornstein, they come from liberal and conservative think tanks:
Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. In 2012—the most recent poll I can find—89% of Americans thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. And even the right to abortion, that issue that has burned in American politics since 1972 when President Richard Nixon began to use it to attract Democratic Catholics to the Republican ticket, remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.
A full decade ago, in April 2012, respected scholars Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, crunched the numbers and concluded: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream,” they wrote, “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
And yet, in the last decade, the party has moved even further to the right. Now it is not only calling for an end to the civil rights protections that undergird modern America, but also lining up behind a leader who tried to overthrow our democracy. A column by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post yesterday was titled: “Fringe Republicans are not the problem. It’s the party’s mainstream.”
The Supreme Court has been stacked with extremists. They won’t stop at rolling back human rights. They’ll continue to come for something you love. Affordable healthcare. Medicare. Social Security. Public schools. Take them for granted at your own risk.
Oh sure, everything mentioned won’t come to pass. Senator Braun of Indiana already had to reverse his position on interracial marriage when he realized it stepped hard on the toes of Justice Clarence Thomas. But the extremist right has been aching for a chance to undo the New Deal for 85 years and they’ve set the stage well to finally do it.
The McCain Feingold Act to provide campaign finance reform? The SpeechNow ruling on fundraising and the Citizens United decision on campaign spending have opened the floodgates on campaigns corrupted by the wealthiest. The flawed effort by John McCain and Russ Feingold actually shifted the dark money flow to more extreme funders like some of the funders of the Federalist Society, the Tea Party, and more.
The Federalist Society, created in 1982, has been busy stacking US courts with right wing judges under the banner of ‘originalism’ which hearkens back to the original Constitution language which was a compromise document designed to appease slaveholders so the thirteen colonies would agree to create a federal government. Many forget that the much revered Bill of Rights came 3 years after the original document but were a promised addendum that got all the states to agree to the first. And the freedoms it delineated only applied to the federal government, not to the governments of each state. It was only the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 that state and local governments began being compelled to acknowledge, respect and protect those rights too. But the Supreme Court only started delineating and enforcing those rights in decisions that came much later, in the second half of the 20th century.
So what value is it to our rights if Federalist Society originalists take us back to the days before states had to respect our rights? Is it just coincidence that the judicial activism they claim to oppose are mostly rulings in favor of human rights?
Reagan and both Bushes appointed many judges that came from the Federalist Society. Under Trump, 43 of his 51 nominees to appellate courts were current or former Federalist Society members. All 6 of the conservatives on the current SCOTUS are Federalist Society members with 5 of them appointed in 2005 and after, making it the most conservative court since the 1930s.
Early funders of the society were Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers and subsequent funders include the Mercers, Chevron and Google. In addition to its court recommendations it serves as a seed bank that germinates ideas and trains its 70,000 lawyer members in what can accurately be described as a culture war. While they are loud and vocal in their opposition to judicial activism, they, in fact, are judicial activists, especially in opposition to abortion and race-based remedies. Their hands are often in on limiting LGBTQ rights, affirmative action and the regulation of property, business and guns.
They also played a central role in the Citizens United ruling. Members were critical to the outcome of the Bush vs Gore ruling in the 2000 election, in the drug wars, in the creation of the badly misnamed Patriot Act (which no real originalist would support), the Valerie Plame Affair and much more. Kenneth Starr, Ed Meese, Robert Bork, John Ashcroft, Michael Chertoff, Orrin Hatch, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are among its better known members today.
The Mercer family, to refresh memories, sponsored Cambridge Analytica with Steve Bannon and were instrumental in getting Trump elected through their message microtargeting techniques. And while I won’t sponsor fresh conspiracy theories, I won’t be surprised if it ultimately comes out that some of the principals in that scandal have been involved in the spreading of the crazy conspiracy theories that motivate Q-Anon followers and other violent extremist groups.
As I mentioned yesterday, racist assholes abound in the efforts to keep moderates and liberals off the courts and away from voting booths. Originalists aren’t original at all; it’s just a useful cover story as they seek to minimize the voices, participation and rights of women as well as racial, ethnic and religious minorities.
Do you intend to wait till everyone else’s rights are gone before they come for yours? Even many in the media are missing the real story here, with a few exceptions.
Get mad. The insurrection is ongoing. And look at where some of the obvious insurrectionists are fleeing to. To Putin’s allies. These are no friends of America or Americans or democracy.
Get mad.