*Justice Kennedy Retirement: Horrifying Consequences*
-The Horrifying Consequences of Justice Kennedy's Retirement. It was fun having anti-discrimination laws, while it lasted.- Think Progress, by Ian Millhiser, June 27, 2018.
Donald Trump is an accidental president. He lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots. And he would be far more powerless if not for the fact that the United States Senate is an anti-democratic relic. The 49 senators in the Democratic caucus represent almost 40 million more people than the 51 in the Republican caucus. And yet, thanks to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision to hand his seat on the Supreme Court to Trump, the illegitimate president will be one of the most consequential American leaders of the modern era. Roe v. Wade will soon be a memory. Anti-discrimination laws will become shriveled husks. The LGBTQ rights revolution will halt and, most likely, begin to march in reverse.
Judgeships could quite literally be up for sale. Religious conservatives will gain sweeping power to defy the law. Executions will flourish. And our best hope of ending partisan gerrymandering will come to a close. The Court’s “swing” vote is now Chief Justice John Roberts — the man who authored a decision holding that America isn’t racist enough to justify a fully operational Voting Rights Act three years before Donald Trump was elected. Things are going to get bad. Fast.
ROE V. WADE: Justice Kennedy is not a fan of abortion rights. He voted to strike down only one of the first 21 abortion restrictions that he considered on the Supreme Court, though he recently added another one to this list in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. Yet his two votes in favor of reproductive choice both shared something in common. Planned Parenthood v. Casey was an explicit invitation to overrule Roe v. Wade — an invitation that Kennedy declined, even though he used Casey as a vehicle to weaken the right to choose. And Whole Woman’s Health was an attempt to effectively denude Roe of any force by giving states broad leeway to impose restrictions on abortion.
Kennedy, in other words, was the Supreme Court’s firewall against a decision overruling Roe altogether. He was content to water down the right to choose, but not to eliminate it outright. With Kennedy gone, that firewall ceases to exist.
RACIAL JUSTICE: Racial justice is another area where Kennedy was no liberal hero. Kennedy voted to strike down public school desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle. And he spent much of his career complaining about affirmative action. Although Kennedy voted in 2016 to spare a fairly modest affirmative action program in Texas, he did so in a way that is likely to make it very difficult (&, potentially, very expensive) for public universities to maintain such programs...
More: LGBTQ Rights, Religious Right to Defy Anti-Discrim. Laws, Gerrymandering, Executions, Confidence in the Court.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-horrifying-consequences-of-justice-kennedys-retirement-90c450d9d106/
https://thinkprogress.org/kennedy-was-a-bad-justice-76e464024d78/
