OUR SUPREME COURT TURNS A BLIND EYE TO GERRYMANDERING
Adam Zyglis for The Buffalo News.
Article III
Section 1.
The Judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain….
Remember that high school civics class when we were taught how wise it was to have an impartial, non-political third branch of government to keep our democratic nation on a fair and balanced course? A Supreme Court that would be above politics? An impartial body that would interpret the Constitution and check any attempted power grab or deviation from the dictates of that secular-sacred document by the Executive and Legislative branches? What a concept!
How’s that impartial third leg of our constitutional stool holding up? Is it still that non-political watchdog we were taught? We allow ten minutes of bitter laughter to die down…and for you to prepare for further bad news. In case you missed it, last week our unpopular, far-right-stacked, Federalist Society ridden, Opus Dei Catholic controlled Supreme Court struck another blow against voting rights and democracy. They refused to overturn Alabama’s latest gerrymander, which limits the state’s 27% Black population to one seat of seven in the nation’s House of Representatives, or 14% of the state’s representation.
As unfair as that may be, Alabama remains a distant also ran in the Red State Democracy Destruction Derby. The front-runners in the GOP gerrymandering race are Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia, though two days ago Florida made a late bid to be the biggest cheater of them all. That’s when Governor Ron DeSantis, the would-be Trump heir, rejected his state legislature’s congressional district map that already favored Republicans and injected his own redistricting plan. It calls for carving up Florida’s Black Fifth District and taking away an additional two seats from the Democrats and adding them to the Republican column. So the cheat goes on…and spreads.
Incidentally, that Supreme Court’s majority 5-4 opinion on Alabama’s case did say the justices would revisit their stay of a lower court decision that found the gerrymander violated the voting rights of Blacks—but it would have to be after this year’s crucial fall election because there wouldn’t be enough time before November. C’mon! You’re telling us it takes ten months to print new ballots?!
The Supreme Court’s recent hands-off policy toward righting the mounting wrongs of gerrymandering gives Red States the go-ahead to suppress further the voting rights of minorities. We should recognize today’s egregious legislative district-drawing for what it is: just another Republican tool to “dismantle the administrative state”—GOP-speak for destroying our democracy as we know it.
Exaggeration? Track SCOTUS’s recent rulings on abortion that restrict a woman’s half-century-old right to control her own body. Do the same for its recent rulings on gun laws, affirmative action, and minority voter suppression.
How did this happen to our highest court? While too few of us were paying attention, the Federalist Society (with all due stealth) packed the Supreme Court with its hand-picked “conservative” (read reactionary) judges. Three of them— Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were appointed by Donald Trump during his mercifully brief reign.
President Obama reacted to the rushed appointment of conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the Court after liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s summer of 2020 death with more than justified eloquence:
Four and a half years ago, when Republicans refused to hold a hearing or an up-or-down vote on Merrick Garland, they invented the principle that the Senate shouldn’t fill an open seat on the Supreme Court before a new president was sworn in. A basic principle of the law—and of everyday fairness—is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what’s convenient or advantageous in the moment. The rule of law, the legitimacy of our courts, the fundamental workings of our democracy all depend on that basic principle.
Amen. Note that early voting for president was already underway in September 2020 when the GOP broke the “McConnell principle” (oxymoron) they had established and rushed Barrett through…just barely, with the vote along strict party lines, with no party crossovers for the first time in our history.
There’s another “first” for the Supreme Court. Its public approval has fallen to an all-time low of 40% in Gallup polling, so alarming to them that three far-right justices ventured out of their monastic seclusion to defend themselves from charges that they were “political.”
One of the trio was the longest-serving Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, best remembered for his dubious role in the Anita Hill affair. For some time now Thomas has taken much heat for violating the Court’s unwritten law that you and your family stay out of politics. Addressing his Notre Dame audience (the university is widely thought to have the best conservative law school), Thomas defended his “above politics” station, and blamed the media for spreading the lie that he was a politician “in robes.” The denial would have fallen on deaf ears in DC’s social circles. There his wife Ginni Thomas for decades has been a loud and public voice for several far-right organizations, and was a vocal backer of the January 6 Insurrection. It is worth noting that Thomas was the lone nay in the 8-1 Supreme Court decision to reject former President Trump’s request that the House’s January 6 Committee be denied access to his papers; his wife Ginni protested that the committee itself was illegitimate.
More recently Justice Samuel Alito, slightly to the right of Charlemagne politically, told his own Notre Dame audience that he was there “to dispel some imaginary shadows.” Among them was that the current Court was “a dangerous cabal...deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view….” (Doth the justice protest too much?)
The third defense came from by the Court’s newest member, that far-right Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett. Her lecture, appropriately enough, was delivered at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center. (Yes, that McConnell, “Moscow” Mitch of the deft and dirty hand who got Amy her seat in mid-September 2020, while voting was underway that would make Joe Biden president.)
Barrett told her audience that the Court was not composed of “partisan hacks.” That we should all view the Court to be as non-political as she does. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.” So she says. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law tersely countered for the majority of us. “I would challenge her to give a single instance where the conservative justices took positions that were at odds with the views of the Republican Party,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Thomas and Alito should accept the challenge, too.
Isn’t about time we woke up to the fact that “our” Supreme Court is—consciously and ideologically—in league with the Trumpian GOP coup d’état in progress, and ready to deliver the coup de grâce to our democracy?