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babylonsister

(171,075 posts) Sat Oct 6, 2018, 10:21 AM Oct 2018

Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court -- and that's good

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court — and that’s good
It’s time America woke up to the radical right that’s run the Court for years.
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Oct 5, 2018, 5:00pm EDT

Brett Kavanaugh’s likely confirmation as an associate justice of the Supreme Court has prompted not only exuberance and anger but also a kind of hazy worry in some corners that the circumstances of his ascension will call the Court’s legitimacy into doubt.

Link to tweet

The truth is it’s about time. The one upside to putting a person on the bench whose dishonesty and (literal and metaphorical) intemperance has been on such flagrant display is that it could prompt a sorely needed reckoning with the larger issue of the Court’s mostly pernicious role in American public affairs.

For the past 25 years, the judiciary has moved increasingly further right and the Supreme Court has tossed out duly enacted legislation, opened the floodgates to public corruption, and undermined substantive democracy. The public has largely missed this bigger picture because the American progressive movement has focused attention on the role of Court in protecting abortion rights.

Reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate remedy to this problem, but the first step is to recognize it exists. And there’s no better face for an increasingly radical and anti-democratic Supreme Court than the ruddy, yelling visage of Brett Kavanaugh.

The true turning point for the Court came in the 1995 case of United States v. Lopez, which featured a defendant challenging the Gun-Free School Zones Act. This was, interestingly, not a Second Amendment case that attempted to argue that prohibiting guns near schools violated an individual’s rights to keep and bear arms. Rather, a 5-4 Supreme Court majority invalidated the law on federalism grounds — saying that Congress simply lacked the authority to regulate the matter.

This turned out not to be a huge deal in practice because Congress was able to come back later and rewrite the law with a specific stipulation that it only related to guns that were shipped across states.

It was, however, a shot across the bow that the Supreme Court was no longer going to allow the people’s elected representatives to decide for themselves what steps were and were not useful exercises of congressional authority to regulate the national economy.

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https://www.vox.com/2018/10/5/17941312/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-legitimacy