The Supreme Court handed down two opinions this week that have struck serious blows to the radical left’s agenda. One decision struck down a California law that non-profit groups must disclose funders to law enforcement and another defeated an effort to prevent election integrity laws from being passed in Arizona and other states.
President Joe Biden was apoplectic about the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to uphold Arizona’s voting law, which enacted such measures as banning ballot harvesting.
“I am deeply disappointed in today’s decision by the United States Supreme Court that undercuts the Voting Rights Act,” Biden said. “In a span of just eight years, the Court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted both decisions, including the Americans for Prosperity decision that prevented California from uncovering the group’s funders since it ‘chilled free speech.’
“The decision in Americans for Prosperity further harms our democracy by allowing the suffocation of the airwaves caused by big dark special interest money,” Pelosi said. “This torrent of dark money silences the voices of voters and prevents passage of commonsense, bipartisan and popular legislation – from gun violence prevention to climate action to LGBTQ equality. It is fundamentally anti-democratic, and it cannot go unanswered.”
The SCOTUS decision on the Arizona law was especially damaging given the significant amount of effort expended to prevent election integrity laws from being passed on the invalid grounds that they are ‘racially discriminatory.’
Justice Alito said that Arizona’s law generally makes it ‘very easy to vote’ and he decided that the state’s election law does not violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“In these cases, we are called upon for the first time to apply §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to regulations that govern how ballots are collected and counted,” Alito wrote in his opinion. “Arizona law generally makes it very easy to vote.”
The Democratic Party has responded to the defeats as one might predict: With both renewed calls to pack the courts, as well as a push for moderate Justice Stephen Breyer to retire so a more radical judge can be appointed.
“Today’s ruling is another blow to voting rights. We have no time to waste to protect the right to vote. We must abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts responded. “And we must expand the Supreme Court.”
“And still some people have the nerve to question whether Court expansion is necessary,” Rep. Mondaire Jones also said.
In April, the Democrats actually introduced a bill to expand the Supreme Court, after Biden earlier formed a commission to ‘study’ reforming the court. The Supreme Court would hypothetically gain four new seats, but the dreaded filibuster stands in the Democrats’ way.
The Supreme Court reform commission, however, appears to be ‘fizzling’ on the idea of court-packing, according to a recent Hill report.
“An effort by progressives to expand the Supreme Court is starting to fizzle as a presidential commission tasked with reviewing the controversial proposal saps earlier momentum,” the Hill reported.
“The stalled progress isn’t exactly unwelcome to Democratic leaders in Washington who are happy to avoid a fight over court expansion, which could end up being a political liability for moderate Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections,” the report went on.
“Congressional Democrats would prefer to stay focused on President Biden’s infrastructure agenda and conserve their political capital for a potential Supreme Court confirmation fight if Justice Stephen Breyer announces his retirement this week.”
Indeed, Stephen Breyer is increasingly a target of progressives’ vehemence as they clamor for him to retire.
https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1411000899183550465
“Breyer’s really going to endanger the entire fucking country so that he can keep his cool job isn’t he?” Vox writer Ian Millhiser crassly wrote.
Stephen Breyer didn’t retire yesterday. Of course he didn’t, because like too many centrist Establishment liberal white folks in this country, he doesn’t think there really is a threat to democracy or minority rights, and even if he accepts there is, he ain’t gonna suffer from it
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 2, 2021
“Stephen Breyer didn’t retire yesterday,” MSNBC’s Mehdia Hasan griped. “Of course he didn’t, because like too many centrist Establishment liberal white folks in this country, he doesn’t think there really is a threat to democracy or minority rights, and even if he accepts there is, he ain’t gonna suffer from it.”
“If he wants someone with his values and views to take his place, now is the time to step down,” University of California Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky told NPR.
It doesn’t appear that Breyer has any intention of retiring, however, much to the chagrin of progressives.
“Justice Stephen Breyer has hired a full complement of four law clerks for the next Supreme Court term in a possible signal that he doesn’t have any immediate plans to retire,” Bloomberg Politics reported.
The Democrats are so desperate to weaponize the Supreme Court, or otherwise marginalize it, that legal experts are now weighing methods to reduce the court’s ability to strike down laws.
“Legal experts clashed on Wednesday over the wisdom of proposals to reduce the Supreme Court’s power to strike down democratically enacted laws, as President Biden’s commission on judicial branch overhauls held its first public hearing with witnesses,” the New York Times reported.
“But they spent limited time on the highest-profile idea associated with the panel — the push by some liberals to expand the Supreme Court, in response to Republican hardball moves that have left it with a 6-to-3 conservative majority even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections,” the Times continued.
Interestingly, the Biden-formed commission was exploring ways to keep the Supreme Court out of the radical Congress and the Democrat-run presidency’s way when it comes to setting policy.
“In particular, the witnesses extensively debated ideas for limiting the court’s power of judicial review — such as by stripping its jurisdiction to hear constitutional challenges to particular laws, requiring a supermajority vote of the justices to strike down an act of Congress, or giving lawmakers the power to override rulings invalidating statutes,” the Times noted.
This is quite the turnabout from the pre-Trump era of the Supreme Court, when the radical left was seeking out ways to use an activist court to further its agenda. The Trump legacy of adding three justices to the Supreme Court may indeed prove to be one of the president’s most enduring.
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OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.