Brett Kavanaugh's Court begins its inevitable power grab with Kisor v. Wilkie
We're going to miss judicial restraint now that it is gone.
IAN MILLHISER
DEC 12, 2018, 8:00 AM
The Supreme Court took two important actions on Monday, one which received a raft of high-profile coverage, and another that was barely noticed outside of the legal press. Together, these two actions offer a window into how the Court’s new Republican majority is likely to operate in the near future — slowly on hot button issues that will shine a spotlight on the Court’s conservatism, but much faster on the wonkier, more-difficult-to-understand issues that matter most to the conservative Federalist Society.
The biggest news out of the Court on Monday, at least if you judge by the number of headlines it produced, was the Court’s decision not to hear two lawsuits involving red states’ efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. Much of the reporting on these cases inflates their significance, but the fact that neither Chief Justice Roberts nor Brett Kavanaugh agreed to hear these cases suggests that they “want to give the nation some time to forget about how Kavanaugh got his current job before they declare outright war on reproductive choice.”
The most important news, however, was the Court’s announcement that it will hear Kisor v. Wilkie, a case asking the Court to transfer power from the executive branch to the judiciary. Kisor is likely to be the first of many such cases, and the Court’s decision to hear this case so quickly after Kavanaugh’s confirmation suggests that the Court plans to consolidate power quite rapidly.
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t’s not hard to guess why conservatives on the Supreme Court and in the Federalist Society are so eager to see judicial forbearance doctrines fall. Again, the question these doctrines resolve is not what should our nation’s policies be. It is who should get to make that decision. Forbearance doctrines place power in democratically elected branches that will be controlled by Democrats at least some of the time. Overruling those doctrines shifts power to a Supreme Court that’s likely to be controlled by Republicans for the foreseeable future.
In a world without Chevron and Auer, Democratic administrations will have to seek permission from the Supreme Court’s Republicans every time an agency wants to take regulatory action. Republican administrations, meanwhile are much more likely to get a pass.
The impact of a Supreme Court veto over agency action, moreover, is compounded by the fact that the United States can barely still be described as a democratic republic. Trump is president right now because the Electoral College effectively counts votes cast by rural whites as more important than votes cast by more diverse residents of urban states. Recent elections notwithstanding, gerrymandering remains a yoke around the neck of Democratic House candidates. The malapportioned Senate treats every voter from blood red Wyoming as 67-times more important than a voter from blue California.
A Supreme Court veto over agencies means that Republicans will be able to promulgate new regulations if they only control the White House, but Democrats may be unable to govern unless they somehow manage to capture the presidency and both houses of Congress.
https://thinkprogress.org/brett-kavanaughs-court-threatens-auer-deference-80f4b3e3169d/
All one has to envision is what is going on in Wisconsin and Michigan right now...................voters wanted change, the criminal gang in the two mentioned states said FUCK YOU Voters...........................in this case the Federalist Society is saying FUCK YOU ............................this is why these right wing fascists judges that are being nominated and being confirmed by an asshole and his counsel in the white house should be annulled.......................after all he his from the very beginning of his rein of terror on this country a person that committed a felony.............................
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