For the first time in, I don’t know, 50 or 60 years at least, we have a clear ultra conservative majority on the US Supreme Court. 5-4, with no swing vote even.
My question: how does this affect the average American?
Not just abortion. But civil rights, if you’re African American. What about if you’re gay? What about civil liberties in general? Heck, what if you just want to buy contraception?
Yes, the OP is the first to wonder about this, and as a prize you will receive every album ever recorded, plus a bonus ice-crusher!
In answer to your question, the Stygian night of oppression is about to descend on the land, while moans and lamentations will arise.
More realistically, some established precedents (i.e. on abortion and college admission procedures) will likely be gnawed at from the edges. But I wouldn’t expect wholesale changes in how civil rights-related laws are interpreted.
The reality is that despite all the fearmongering, it isn’t going to make substantial difference. We’re not going back to Jim Crow and Roe v Wade isn’t going anywhere no matter how many times some idiot declares it the end of Western civilization online.
Trump’s gotten his list of judges from the Heritage Foundation. No judge recommended by the Heritage Foundation would ever, under any circumstance, dream of overturning Roe v. Wade. Because if they did, then the Republican party could no longer promise to do it if they could, except those mean babykiller liberals keep stopping them, and that’s the main thing that keeps Republicans getting elected, so they can get about the real business of screwing over the poor.
But that real business of screwing over the poor… Yeah, that’s going to be a problem.
Of course certain columnists and bloggers label everybody who is not a member of the Democratic part as “ultra conservative”, but they are wrong to do so. There is no rational way to claim that Roberts or Kavanaugh are “ultra conservative”. It might be possible to make such a claim about Thomas or Alito. Gorsuch is a conservative with a strong libertarian bent.
I would expect major changes in the court’s stances on only a very small number of issues. The best thing that I would hope for soon is that the court will finally get around to issuing the obvious ruling that affirmative action is unconstitutional.
Yes, they aren’t fairly called “ultra conservatives,” but they are definitely conservative. Being pro-life is a conservative position, and Roe v. Wade was decided in a way that contradicts current conservative jurisprudence.
And the entire point of the Heritage List was to get Roe v. Wade overturned. That is why a good portion of Trump voters voted for him. It’s literally been their plan forever: that’s why there are once again abortion cases coming up the pike.
It’s not a done deal, of course, as judges don’t always vote the way the people who install them expect. But make no mistake–the reason for putting them on the court was Roe v. Wade.
You don’t even hear Republicans whining about SSM anymore. But they still go on about abortion. That’s what they care about.
And they can hold onto such voters simply by scaremongering that Dems will allow abortion again, same as they make up a new gun control issue to be worried about all the time.
Any reason you can come up with to be sure they won’t overturn Roe v. Wade is just whistling in the dark.
I think on Roe v. Wade, they are probably going to let it die a death by a thousand cuts in which abortion is still officially legal in all 50 states, but not practically possible in 30 of them.
But the real game changer is going to be corporate law, with a near elimination of worker and consumer rights, and on the power of the EPA and SEC to regulate, the robber barons will party like it’s 1899.
If you consider how often decisions come down to a 5-4 vote, it becomes clear that the extremists do not make the decisions on SCOTUS. The decisions are made by the moderates on the bench. They will consider the case, and figure out who needs to vote which way to achieve the 5-4 vote. The addition of Kavanaugh only means that one of the moderates will have to vote liberal a bit more frequently.
You just yourself repeated the reason why they won’t: Because promising to do so gets Republicans elected. If they actually did it, they wouldn’t have anything left to promise any more, and so Republicans would stop getting elected. Which would be fine, if the goal of the Heritage Institute were to abolish abortion. But it’s not. Their goal is to increase income inequality, and Republican politicians are a means to that end.
Yep, labor, consumers, environmental protections, etc. Basically, whatever big business wants will be a little easier. Force arbitration, limits on lawsuits, and more cases dismissed by judges without ever getting to bring your evidence to a jury (aka summary judgment). Most of it will be under the radar unless you happen to be the injured party.
I don’t think the current 5-4 reflects a “solidly” conservative majority. Roberts has become the new Kennedy, and as Chief Justice it seems he wants to be unpredictable because it undermines the legitimacy of SCOTUS for there to be numerous 5 red 4 blue outcomes. Aside from voting for ACA, he has been known to deliberately go “blue” from time to time to keep people on their toes.
It’s worth noting that Kentucky certainly wants to be at the forefront of a Roe vs Wade repeal. They’re positively giddy at the notion, and a big part are Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
Ignoring the unfair characterization of the GOP as out to screw over the poor, there was an insightful remark on a recent conservative podcast recently I thought was relevant. Which was, the GOP has been so successful at cutting taxes, they can no longer use it as a promise to get elected, as they did in decades past. The tax burden for an average middle class family is quite bearable, and as such, provides much less leverage than it once did.
And I do agree that the fear about overturning Roe V. Wade is much ado about nothing. Ignoring the fact that Kavanaugh was a bit of a question mark on the issue, the cultural tumult that it would produce would reverberate so strongly that I don’t think anybody in power wants to be around if such a thing ever happened.
The tax burden on the average middle class family has always been quite bearable. The Republicans have never made much difference there, nor have they ever intended to.
The average middle class federal income tax rate has fallen over the past few decades from 11.5% to about 3.5%, in large part thanks to ERTA and the Bush tax cuts. There’s only so low they can go.
It should be noted that they aren’t conservatives per se (except Kavanaugh), but rather originalists and textualists. These are different things, though frequently allied. They would posit that the Constitution has a fixed meaning that can largely be based on the intent of the writers of the document or how people at the time would have understood the meaning of the document. Conservatives like this because a lot of what we consider rights are not really rights that our Founding Fathers considered or advocated. They are judicial creations and they tend ti be progressive in nature.
Originalists and/or textualists suffer from the fallacious mindset in assuming that someone else, back in the past with less information, nevertheless knows more about your situation in the here-and-now than you yourself. A ludicrous notion with no evidence to support it.
That’s not the assumption that an originalist or textualist makes. The assumption is that there is a process for changing the law if the here and now folks want to do so and it’s not for judges to step in place of the legislature.
side note - does it upset anyone else’s sense of order that there are two threads titled, “The Kavanaugh Effect”?