i
The
U.S. Supreme Court is an illegitimate institution that is a threat to
the lives of Black people and other marginalized groups in
particular, and those who are not white Christian supremacist men.
Now is the time to shut the whole thing down now and start from
scratch before more people die.
The
recent decisions coming from this court are all the proof you need
that we are in danger. Consider the overturning
of Roe
v. Wade
and the end of safe, accessible abortions and a woman’s right
to control her own body in about half of the states. This decision
will have a disproportionate impact on Black
women,
who are twice as likely to lose a baby to premature death, and three
to four times more likely to die from complications during pregnancy.
One study predicts that an abortion ban will increase
Black maternal deaths
by a third, the highest increase of any group. Black women, who have
the highest
rate of abortions,
followed by Latina women, already face systemic racism, poverty and a
lack of health care access.
Consider
the court’s recent
ruling
that was a direct jab at the separation of church and state and
allows taxpayers’ dollars to pay for religious schools. White
Christian nationalists have used religion to maintain racial
segregation and developed
the concept
of school
vouchers
following the Supreme Court’s Brown
v. Board of Education
desegregation decision to fund whites-only segregation academies.
This
court struck down New York’s 108-year-old gun control law and
proclaimed that people have a constitutional right to walk around
carrying concealed
weapons
in public. The ruling will impact states that account for a quarter
of the U.S. population, undermining larger cities’ efforts to
curb an epidemic of gun violence and address the threats to Black
lives.
After
gutting the
Voting Rights Act in 2013,
the court is allowing states to use illegal racially
gerrymandered districts
that erase Black power.
A
conservative majority just weakened the enforcement of Miranda
rights
and the ability of people to sue the police for failing to warn them
of their “right to remain silent” during an arrest. And
the Supreme Court said that innocence was not enough
to overturn the conviction of a Black man who was convicted of murder
and rape and is sitting on death row. If innocence is not enough for
this court, then what is? And what is justice, for that matter?
This
court is a Jim Crow, Christian-fascist monarchy
that is fulfilling the hopes and dreams of the modern conservative
movement and the promise of white minority rule. Republicans are
using the courts to promote an agenda of highly racist, unpopular,
undemocratic and obscenely cruel policies. With each passing day,
people wonder if they will awaken to find that the U.S. Supreme Court
has taken away another basic human right. What’s next? Banning
contraceptives? Same-sex marriage? Interracial marriage? Stealing
elections? Will Black people find themselves picking cotton for free
tomorrow?
In
his concurring
opinion
in the Dobbs
decision overturning abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas said
the quiet part out loud and urged the court to reverse past decisions
that granted privacy rights under the 14th Amendment.
What
we have is a radical
and extremist Supreme Court with warped priorities, little-to-no
accountability other than impeachment and no ethics rules to rein in
its members. The highest court in the land erected barricades to
protect itself from protesters, yet will not protect schoolchildren
from armed gunmen. This is a court that will investigate the leaking
of a draft opinion banning abortion but will not investigate Ginni
Thomas—the
wife of Justice Thomas—much less force the justice to recuse
himself. Ginni Thomas allegedly pressed Trump’s
chief of staff
and 29
Arizona officials
to overturn the 2020 election. Ginni also reportedly has close ties
to her husband’s former law clerks,
including former Trump attorney John Eastman, who is at the center of
the Jan. 6 hearings for his efforts to keep Trump in power.
Meanwhile,
Justice Thomas—who has desecrated the legacy of Thurgood
Marshall for over 30 years, and has brought shame to the
Gullah-Geechee people who birthed him—was the only justice to
vote against releasing White House documents to the House Jan. 6
committee that may implicate
his wife.
Thomas
has decried a lack
of respect
for institutions such as the Supreme Court and said the court
shouldn’t be bullied
into making particular decisions. But how can we respect an
institution that is illegitimate, corrupt and pathological?
All
judges have their own opinion, but they are supposed to be fair and
seek justice. The conservative justices—several of whom were
placed on the court through the breaking
of norms,
a sketchy confirmation process and while lying
under oath—openly
flaunt their Republican Party affiliation. Handmaid
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
argued last year that the Supreme Court is not a “bunch of
partisan hacks” as she spoke at the McConnell Center at the
University of Louisville, sitting next to Sen. Mitch McConnell, the
man with the receipts for her Supreme Court seat.
The
fact is the six-member majority of the Supreme Court is a
wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party and the billionaire
donors who paid for them. As Sen.
Sheldon Whitehouse
(D-RI) has noted, a dark-money, Koch Brothers-funded group called the
Judicial
Crisis Network
(JCN) waged a $2.5 million ad campaign to derail the nomination of
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. JCN spends millions of dollars each year
“to sway state judicial elections and attorneys general races,
helping to uphold state laws backed by conservatives, nurture
like-minded talent in the states, and advance pro-business,
limited-government legal agendas aligned with its donors’
leanings.”
At
the heart of this network is Federalist Society Co-Chairman Leonard
Leo, who controls the vetting of conservative Supreme Court
candidates and, and leads the $250
million
effort from undisclosed donors to reshape
the courts
in the mold of the extreme right. Leo promotes voter
fraud conspiracy theories
and leads GOP
voter suppression efforts.
Republican
success in capturing the Supreme Court was decades in the making, and
Democrats failed to take the crisis seriously. Biden put together a
Supreme
Court reform commission
that amounted to nothing. Expert
testimony
before that commission revealed the U.S. Supreme Court is the oldest
and most outdated judicial system in the world. The court is an
outlier in the international community in terms of its outsized
power, lifetime tenure and the ability to nullify laws and rights
under a Constitution that is nearly impossible to amend.
With
a court that is not designed to meet the demands of a modern society
or protect the rights of Black people and other groups, exactly what
are we doing? The highest court in the land is a corrupt body in need
of change, but is reform enough? Can we really reform the court that
gave us Dred
Scott v. Sandford
and Plessy
v. Ferguson,
and
has terrorized
Black people
for most of its history? Is trimming the green mold on a rotting
piece of meat the answer, or do you find an entirely different means
of sustenance?
Since
the Supreme Court never protected Black people, the goal should not
be reform to bring us back to the way things were, but rather to take
us where we should be. America never was a true democracy, and as
civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn
Ifill
reminds us, “Remember that we have never seen the America we’ve
been fighting for. So no need to be nostalgic. Right on the other
side of this unraveling is opportunity.”
And
while Black people should be proud of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson,
the first Black woman selected for the court, there is no pride in
having a Black woman sit powerless on a court as it presides over the
removal of Black people’s civil rights.
Corrupt,
toxic and illegitimate, the Supreme Court is an anti-democratic force
in America, a white Christian nationalist operation that needs a
replacement before it kills us. Not all coups and insurrections take
place with lynch mobs. Sometimes the legalese of a court opinion is
enough.
This
commentary is also posted on The
Grio
