There have been numerous contributors to the decline of America's democracy and the rise of plutocrat rule, but one institution bears a huge amount of responsibility: The U.S. Supreme Court. More precisely, the conservative majority on the Court, including supposed swing vote, former Justice Anthony Kennedy. This clique of "conservatives" have put its collective religious and political views ahead of democracy and, in the process, has done severe harm to the constitutional system designed by the Founding Fathers and landmark civil rights legislation. One of the most damning - and ridiculous - rulings was Citizens United that held that corporations were "persons" under the law and, therefore entitled to assert "personal beliefs" and to give unlimited funds to political PACS and dark money groups. As a column in the Washington Post lays out, Chief Justice John Roberts is being forced to watch the fruits of the conservative justices toxic handiwork as he presides of Der Trumpenführer's impeachment trial - a trial Senate Republicans are turning into a farce and cover-ups. Here are column excerpts:
There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.
Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.
Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.
The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decision hobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.
The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote.
Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.
He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.
Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”
Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the campaign finance system post-Citizens United would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”
Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.
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