The Supreme Court’s Dark Money Crisis: Wyden’s Revolutionary Fix

How expanding and regulating the court could save America from GOP billionaires

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My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available here.

The six Republicans on the US Supreme Court are up to their old tricks, ruling this week that Texas’ draconian abortion ban can continue without modification, meaning that more women in that state will die or bleed out to the point where their lives are in danger and/or their ability to have future children is ended.

They are doing this, in part, because the Court has been captured by a fringe rightwing Catholic death cult, the result of an intentional, well-funded campaign.

Longtime readers of Hartmann Report know I’ve written extensively on the corruption of the Supreme Court by the billionaires who fund and control the GOP. I’ve written two entire books about the Court — Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People” and The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America — hoping to stimulate interest in the topic and get some legislative solutions to this out-of-control institution that is absolutely unanswerable to the people of the United States.

Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who’s been a frequent guest on my radio/TV program, was apparently listening, or at least is on the same wavelength. He’s proposed new legislation that would pretty much solve the major problems with our Court and corruption-proof it as we go forward.

Along with efforts to get money out of politics and establish an absolute right to vote, Wyden’s Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation Democrats have put forward in years. It would, as he lays out on his Senate website:

• Expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices.

  • The expansion is staggered over a total of 12 years with a president getting to appoint one nominee in the first and third years of each presidential term.

• Establish a new supermajority [2/3rds vote] threshold to overturn acts of Congress on a constitutional basis at both the Supreme Court and Circuit Court level.

• Require that relief granted by lower courts in cases seeking to invalidate an act of Congress expire upon the issuing date of an opinion by the Supreme Court.

• Establish a new process for Supreme Court nominations that are not reported out of committee within 180 calendar days to be automatically placed on the Senate calendar [thus ending the little trick that let Mitch McConnell steal two seats by rigging the Senate schedule].

• Expand the number of circuit courts to 15 [to deal with the crisis of our clogged courts] and return to the practice of assigning one Supreme Court justice to oversee each circuit. [Currently there are 13 circuit courts and only 9 SCOTUS justices.]

• Expand the number of circuits by splitting the Ninth Circuit and establishing a new Southwestern Circuit.

• Expand the number of Circuit Court and District Court judgeships to improve access to justice.

The bill increases transparency to improve public trust by:

• Requiring all justices to consider recusal motions and make their written opinions publicly available. Any justice would be recused from a case upon the affirmative vote of the justices.

• Requiring the public disclosure of how each justice voted for any case within the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. [No more unsigned decisions.}

• Requiring the IRS to initiate an audit of each justice's income tax return (and any amended return) as quickly as practicable after it is filed. Within 90 days of filing, the IRS would be required to publicly release the returns and provide an update on the status of the audit. Every 180 days thereafter, the IRS must update the public on the status of the audit. It will also release the ultimate findings of the audit.

• Requiring those nominated to the Court to include their most recent three years of tax returns in their publicly-available financial disclosure filings. In the case that a nominee does not disclose the tax returns within 15 days after nomination, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts would be instructed to obtain the tax returns from the Secretary of the Treasury and make them public. The Secretary of the Treasury is instructed to redact certain personal identity information.

Wyden’s legislation is breathtaking in its breadth and scope and is the perfect companion legislation to a binding and enforceable code of ethics for Supreme Court justices.

And the public is ready for it. Approval of the Court is at an historic low; rather than pussyfooting around the topic, Democrats should be taking the Court on hard and often. It’s not only important for our democracy; it’s also good politics.

In a recent podcast from David Sirota’s news site The Lever, Republican Senator John Thune tells the story of how he took down Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle by campaigning relentlessly on Republicans taking control of the Supreme Court. Thune bragged to his audience:

“It was one of our biggest applause lines.”

The Supreme Court is an issue that Republicans have been using to win elections since the 1950s, and Democrats have tragically ignored.

As a result, Republicans on the Court have, among other things:

— stripped Americans of our voting rights,
— blocked President Biden’s efforts to reduce student debt,
— allowed Red states to deny low-income workers access to Medicaid,
— endorsed massive voter purges,
— legalized political bribery and dark money,
— legalized foreign involvement in our elections,
— given corporations access to the Bill of Rights,
— gutted unions’ rights and the right to unionize,
— endorsed discrimination against queer and other minority communities,
— largely ended affirmative action,
— ended the power of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses,
— created an entire billionaire- and corporate-run dark money machine,
— handed the 2000 election to its loser,
— blocked or slowed federal and state prosecutions of Trump,
— placed the president above the law,
— made themselves the sole arbiters of what a president may or may not do,
— ended women’s constitutional right to abortion,
— radically cut back on American’s right to protest,
— filled our streets and schools with guns, and,
— legalized the equivalent of machine guns.

Hopefully, Wyden’s legislation can make it into law, enabling us to rescue our republic from the clutches of the corrupt, retrograde Republicans on the Court who’ve seized it.

It’s another vital reason we must do everything we can to hold the Senate and White House this November, along with retaking the House.

Vote!