The Chief review: John Roberts and the decline of American democracy
The Chief review: John Roberts and the decline of American democracy
The chief justice presided over Citizens United, gutting voting rights and more. An admiring biography leaves a bitter taste
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/apr/21/the-chief-john-roberts-supreme-court-justice-joan-biskupic?utm_term=RWRpdG9yaWFsX0d1YXJkaWFuVG9kYXlVUy0xOTA0MjE%3D&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&CMP=GTUS_email
If you believe, as I do, that the decline of the United States began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which brought a new determination to make the rich richer and America whiter through huge tax cuts for the wealthy and the re-segregation of education, and if you agree that those noxious leitmotifs are still doing profound damage to our republic, it is not difficult to argue that John Roberts has done as much as any other member of his generation to hasten the decline of American democracy.
The pages of Joan Biskupic’s new, carefully reported biography of the chief justice are replete with evidence to support that conclusion – which Biskupic is much too polite to reach.
<<snip>>
At 26, Roberts became a special assistant to attorney general William French Smith, which gave him a “key connection to the legal network in Washington”. He immediately staked out his loathsome opinions on many of the most important social issues of our time. Biskupic writes: “A straight line can be drawn from his positions on voting rights, affirmative action, religion and abortion rights in the 1980s to his expressed views” on the supreme court after his appointment in 2005.
<<snip>>
When the landmark case of Shelby County v Holder reached the supreme court in 2013, Roberts delivered the majority opinion that gutted legislation which had done so much to ensure the suffrage rights of African Americans routinely banned from southern polling places since the end of the civil war.
That decision came three years after Roberts lobbed his single largest grenade at the heart of American democracy, when he joined the other conservative justices to give corporations the right to spend as much money as they chose to elect the public officials who would be most enthusiastic about promoting unfettered capitalism. The majority in Citizens United decided that any limit on independent campaign spending by corporations was a violation of the first amendment. Since then, almost all of the tensions between democracy and capitalism have been resolved in favor of the latter.
<<snip>>
This leaves little hope that Roberts could emerge as a key figure in a national effort to reverse the worst excesses of the Trump administration, particularly if the White House holds firms to its announced intention to resist all subpoenas from a Democratic House of Representatives, and the supreme court becomes the final arbiter in this emerging constitutional crisis.
= new reply since forum marked as read
constitutional rights to fictional personhoods that now dominate the government of flesh and blood humans -- it's all so dark to me now.
How could he think that non-living entities should control a democracy of humans. I can't even...
Hope and change seem far away.
The core belief of the Federalist Society and its bots, embodied by Roberts.
That underlies everything.
