The Supreme Court Only Cares About the Wealthy and Powerful

This excerpt is from a piece by Keith Thirion that originally ran in Democracy Docket on July 18, 2024.

If you don’t already have money and power, the current Supreme Court majority doesn’t care about you. That must be our major takeaway from the 2023–24 term, because it not only explains almost every egregious decision the Court made, but also speaks to why the current ethics corruption on the Court is such an urgent concern.

Consider the underreported case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the Court gave cities the green light to criminalize homelessness. With this permission, any city can now pass an ordinance like Grants Pass’s law banning sleeping outside, potentially forcing unhoused people to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Fulfilling a basic human need —  sleep — has become a reason for incarceration.

At the same time that individuals may now struggle to find a place to lay their head without being arrested for it, the Court is allowing corporations to further dirty the air they must breathe, blocking air pollution protections in Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA had instituted a policy called the Good Neighbor Plan to make sure states don’t have to be subjected to downwind pollution generated in other states. The states that want to generate this pollution challenged the policy, and the Court blocked it before the lower courts could even fully litigate the case.

The juxtaposition between these two cases is harsh. Polluters get an instant win, while unhoused people are left with no solutions for basic survival. What we see in case after case is that those who want to abuse their power win, while any attempts to protect against that abuse lose.

Read the complete piece.