From Oaths to Lies: The GOP's Supreme Court Coup

Sworn to uphold the law, Republican justices have twisted legal precedents to serve a radical agenda. This betrayal threatens the very fabric of American democracy…

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

In JD Vance’s speech last night — arguing that America is “not just an idea” of a pluralistic, multiracial society but instead is “a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington” where rural white Americans live — he didn’t shout out to the Supreme Court and how they have paved the way for the radical Project 2025 agenda to deconstruct the America we know. But he could have.

Every one of those Republican justices on the Supreme Court, when questioned about the topic during their Senate confirmation hearings, promised to respect the text and meaning of the Constitution, previous Courts’ precedents or stare decisis, and legal history.

Each of them lied about these things under oath.

Making it worse, most Americans have no idea how much power the Court has taken onto itself (Marbury v Madison) and thus the authority they exercise over each of our daily lives on behalf of the billionaires who subsidize them and JD Vance.

This term, these reactionary Republicans on the Court, who’d legalized political bribery in 2010 with the 5-4 Citizens United decision, took it a massive step farther, saying that if a politician or judge/justice accepts the bribe after they’ve done a legislative or judicial favor, then that quid pro quo is no longer a bribe: it’s now merely a tip.

In this, they took a bite out of America’s first anti-bribery law, passed in 1789 by the First Congress and signed into law by George Washington, and the 1790 Crimes Act that outlawed bribing federal judges like themselves for over 230 years. Nothing radical there, right?

In addition, over just the past three years, these corrupt, on-the-take politicians-in-robes:

— Gave draconian king-like powers to a president to break the law and have immunity from prosecution so long as he declares what he’s doing to be an “official act,” rewriting Article II of our Constitution that was ratified in 1789.
— Signed the death warrant for the agencies that protect our air, water, food, drugs, and workplaces (among other things) established in the years since 1887 when Congress authorized the first regulatory agency (the Interstate Commerce Commission).  
— Gutted the 14th Amendment’s clear requirement, put into the Constitution in 1868, that “no person” who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” … “or given aid or comfort” to insurrectionists can hold public office of any sort.
— Rewrote the National Firearms Act of 1934 to allow AR15s and similar semiautomatic weapons of war to fire as if fully automatic with a bump-stock accessory.
— Reached back to destroy the equal protection provisions of the 1868 14th Amendment by ruling that white legislators can exclude Black people from congressional districts so long as they call their motivation “political” rather than “racial” (having already blown up the 1965 Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision).
— Stripped the EPA of its 1970 power to regulate CO2 in a major gift to their billionaire fossil fuel industry patrons.
— Ended federal protections for abortion that went into effect with Roe v Wade in 1973.
— Threw out prosecutions against January 6th rioters and Donald Trump for obstructing Congress in its official duties, overturning that provision in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
— Blocked the EPA from its 1970 power, upheld by the Court in 2007 (Mass v EPA), to protect states from pollution originating in nearby states or to protect wetlands.
— Dialed back the SEC’s 1934 power to protect American citizens from fraud and exploitation by giant corporations (particularly in banking and securities).
— Ended racial affirmative action programs in higher education by negating President John Kennedy’s 1961 Executive order 10925 and the 1969 Philadelphia Plan.
— Legalized discrimination against queer people so long as that discrimination is based in “deeply held religious beliefs,” stripping gender discrimination out of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
— Ended the ability of states (first enacted in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813) to require justification for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
— Gave religious fanatics the power to compel, via peer pressure, public school students to participate in public prayer, overturning the wall of separation between church and state built into our Constitution in 1789.
— Required states (Maine in this case) to pay tuition assistance monies to religious schools, also rejecting the 1789 Establishment Clause of the Constitution.
— Blocked President Biden’s effort to reduce and ameliorate student debt.

Next year it’s a safe bet that they’ll overturn the rights to contraception (Griswold), intimacy between queer people (Lawrence), gay marriage (Obergefell), a racially integrated education (Brown), and perhaps even the right of people of different races to marry (Loving), since that right is predicated on the same right-to-privacy basis as contraception and gay marriage.

They’ve already signaled that they intend to strip the FDA of its power to legalize mifepristone and will recognize that the Comstock Act is still operational, which will effectively outlaw all abortion (and all pornography) in the United States.

When Republicans and their morbidly rich billionaire owners undertook a 1982 project to seize control of the courts, they understood the stakes. If they could pack the Court with truly radical justices, they could overturn more than 200 years of American democracy and hand our government straight off to themselves and their corporations.

While the president and Congress must answer to the voters, justices on the Court have asserted that they answer to nobody. As Sam Alito famously wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

“No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”

Of course, in this, he was simply lying — and depending on the American public’s, the media’s, and members of Congress’ ignorance of Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution — which explicitly says:

“[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

President Biden leaked this week that, if re-elected, he and Vice President Harris will introduce legislation to do just what the Constitution says Congress must do: regulate the Court. The details are expected next week.

It’s about damn time.

They’ve already done such severe and possibly irreparable (in a lifetime) damage that their aggregate decisions are right up there with Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson in terms of their power to tear America apart. As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote this week:

“The unchecked corruption crisis on the Supreme Court has now spiraled into a Constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large.”

Call your members of the House and Senate to tell them you support Democrats’ efforts to regulate the Court, and let Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin know he should open hearings now into their conflicts of interest, refusals to recuse, and bribe-taking. The number for Congress’ switchboard is 202-224-3121.