In June 2022 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that women no longer have a Constitutional right to abortion. While previously the personal privacy of women had been balanced by the State’s interest in the life of a viable fetus, a woman is now little more than a uterus without rights for the majority-Catholic court. Once Dobbs was decided, an emboldened Republican Party quickly announced it had other reproductive and civil rights in its crosshairs.
While the Democratic Party in general is now pushing to strengthen reproductive rights in Blue states, and claims it wants to make abortion a winning 2024 campaign issue, President Joe Biden told a group of wealthy donors recently that, while he supported the Roe v Wade compromise, “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion…” This lack of urgency (or real commitment for that matter) coming from an 80 year-old male citing his religious reservations is guaranteed to take the air out of the Democratic Party’s support for the bodily autonomy of women.
Yesterday the majority white Supreme Court dismantled Affirmative Action programs and upheld the rights of Christians to refuse to work on Sundays. Today it handed down rulings barring student debt forgiveness and upholding the right of Christians to discriminate against gay people.
We seem to be well on our our way to the Christian theocracy the GOP has in mind for us.
Most Democrats recognize that we are right on the edge of irrevocably losing whatever shreds of democracy the Court’s Christian Nationalists have not already torched. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer expressed outrage when the Dobbs decision was announced and lashed out with, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” Despite the tough guy impression, Schumer has done little to provide meaningful oversight of the Court and has resisted calls to expand it.
Other Democratic Senators led by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey are calling for enlarging the number of Justices. In 2021 a group of progressive New York legislators called for enlarging it as well, appealing for Democrats to give up the ridiculous pretense that the Court is even-handed. “The Republican Party […] uses aggressive tactics to stack the courts with right-wing ideologues, cultivated in their own parallel legal ecosystem. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has fought to preserve the myth of our apolitical judiciary,” stated an appeal organized by State Assembly member elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani of the 36th district (NY).
Regardless, President Biden remains firmly opposed to court expansion.
You might recall that Biden embraced the role of “healer in chief” when he won the Presidency. In retrospect, part of the healing was to reassure Republicans he wasn’t going to tinker with the Supreme Court. Biden created a 36-member commission to look at the Court and its final report infuriatingly cautioned that enlarging the court would call the Court’s legitimacy into question.
The scope of the SCOTUS Sugar Daddy problem might have been unknown at the time but the corruption and conflicts of interest of several of its justices (and one insurrectionist spouse) were well-known. Last year Democrats sponsored toothless performative legislation to impose term limits on Supreme Court Justices, but the Constitution is the only mechanism that can actually change a justice’s term of office.
Critics questioned the centrist composition of Biden’s commission, its objectivity, and an Atlantic article wrote it off with: “Biden wished to avoid weighing in on this politically explosive proposal. The commission was his attempt to avoid having to do so.”
Yesterday the President doubled down on his do-nothing strategy, telling an MSNBC reporter that, while the court “may do too much harm […] I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we are going to politicize it maybe forever, in a way that is not healthy.” Once again, the 80 year-old President seemed to dismiss the severity of the problem. And Biden’s given reason for refusing to expand the Court only made a mockery of how politicized it is already.
To find similar upheavals in legal systems elsewhere you need only travel to Central Asia, where Iran suffered similar rapid-fire decrees by religious courts as the Shah’s dictatorship became a religious dictatorship. Remember conservative Americans whining about “shariah law” and “Islamofascism” in the Muslim world? These same Americans are now all-too eager for a religious dictatorship here.
The Supreme Court’s rulings have enabled a dictatorship of sorts for a shrinking, desperate demographic — white Christians. They and their party have become oppressors of a long list of victims which include: women of childbearing age, LGBTQ+ individuals, migrants, people of color, Muslims, public school teachers, librarians, secular Americans, liberal Jews, academics, union workers, environmental scientists, civil rights activists, civil libertarians, police reformers, war resisters, historians, sociologists, child psychologists, reproductive rights physicians, and anyone even barely to the left of the John Birch Society.
With today’s ruling barring college debt forgiveness, the Supreme Court now adds young people to its hit list – young people who indebted themselves in order to play the American meritocracy game. The Court’s ruling should have been a surprise to no one. As savings and loan, stock market, auto industry, insurance industry, bank, and pandemic bailouts for corporations have repeatedly demonstrated, human capital is never of equal importance. When actual living, breathing humans experience real crises in their lives, we discover all too quickly that, in America, you are on your own.
The issues America faces require political leadership people can believe in. And secular America needs a fighter rather than a healer.
Given Biden’s poor polling, his age, his gaffes, his reckless foreign policy, his apparent lack of interest in tackling controversial problems, a dangerous primary opponent (RFK Jr.), a wildcard from the Left (Cornell West), and a stealth MAGA candidate who will probably run under the No Labels label, the Democratic Party is going to have a serious problem in 2024 if they stick with Biden.
It’s time for the DNC grownups to begin thinking of an alternative to Biden in 2024. If the Democratic nominee won’t fight the GOP like he really means it, a secular and diverse America is going to lose even more than we have already.
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