The Supreme Court's golden rule: Only Republican leaders hold true power

[marmar]

The Supreme Court's golden rule: Only Republican leaders hold true power
The only "legal theory" the Supreme Court is operating under: Republicans alone have a right to rule

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
PUBLISHED JANUARY 14, 2022 1:16PM


(Salon) Oh boy, remember the summer of 2021? That's when we were deluged with spicy hot takes about how the Supreme Court isn't nearly as bad as liberals feared it would be. Well, here we are half a year away and that supposedly reasonable Supreme Court just proved all of its critics right. They are a bunch of partisan hacks who will ignore the plain letter of the law in order to undermine Democratic governance and install Republicans into power.

Thursday's decision to strike down President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers certainly wasn't the result of a good faith reading of the law. It wasn't even an expression of some ideological opposition to the "administrative state," as Steve Bannon and other authoritarian nuts sneeringly call it. No, the only jurisprudence guiding the Republican-controlled Supreme Court — which has a whopping three appointees by Donald Trump sitting on it — is a belief that the only legitimate presidents are Republicans. We know this not just because of the bad faith of the decision itself, but also by contrasting it with the warm-and-fuzzy feelings that the justices have towards expansive presidential powers when Republicans are in charge.

First of all, the decision itself is a joke. As legal expert Mark Joseph Stern at Slate wrote, the court's "unsigned majority opinion rests on several dubious claims" and, crucially, "is utterly untethered to the plain text of the law." The anti-mandate argument held that because COVID-19 is a general threat to public health, it cannot be considered a discrete workplace safety issue. But, as many folks pointed out, the conservative justices don't believe their own reasoning here, as evidenced by the fact that the Supreme Court building's pandemic precautions are justified as a workplace safety issue.

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To that end, the motives of the conservative justices are no different than the QAnon shaman and the other jackasses who stormed the Capitol last year in an attempt to overturn the election. They all flat-out reject that right of duly elected Democrats to govern. The justices may hide this anti-democratic sentiment behind faux-legalese and the enrobed pretenses of the Supreme Court, while the QAnoners hide it behind lurid talk of cannibalistic pedophiles and stolen elections. Underneath it all, however, is the same idea: Only Republicans have a legitimate claim to power. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/01/14/the-golden-rule-only-leaders-hold-true-power/