The U.S. Supreme Court’s Supreme Takeover
This excerpt is from a piece by Rakim Brooks that originally ran in Democracy Docket on July 6, 2023.
As the U.S. Supreme Court approached the final days of its term, there was some speculation that perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts prevailed in moderating the Court’s most extreme case elements. In out-of-character rulings, he had preserved what is left of the Voting Rights Act, protected state Supreme Courts’ role in checking election policy and upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act.
But as the final decisions of the term dropped, it was clear this Court is as extreme as ever — with the chief as much in the mix as any of the Trump appointees.
The Supreme Court has effectively ended affirmative action in education, created a blanket license for business owners to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people (and anyone else really) and trampled President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan. The affirmative action and religious discrimination cases again overturned decades of precedent for no good reason, while the student debt cases employed a Congress-be-damned approach to separation of powers. All together, these legally indefensible decisions demonstrated there are no limits to this Court’s hunger for power.