The Supreme Court Has Always Been This Bad

"It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the American republic's current set of staggering problems and seemingly intractable crises can and should be blamed on a single institution: the United States Supreme Court. Other actors, of course, bear responsibility as well: a highly distractible mainstream media, corporate kleptocrats, a generation or two of now-discredited neoliberals and neoconservatives pushing domestic and foreign policy initiatives that it was clear at the time were unjust and unworkable and indeed have not worked out at all."

"Yet none of them would have been in a position to see their will so consequentially enacted had they not been empowered by the Supreme Court, which, over the last 40 or so years, has green-lighted media consolidation and conglomeration, hollowing out the local and independent journalism on which democracy depends; turned corporations into persons, opening the campaign-finance spigots and flooding the public square with dark money;"

"Not to mention rulings that have hollowed out labor unions; overturned hard-earned protections for the right to vote; and annulled the right to have an abortion it had itself previously recognized as inviolable. Most recently, the court decided that the president is above and beyond the reach of the law-a decision it is no exaggeration to say demolished in one blow an essential pillar of the constitutional system."

The Supreme Court has enabled concentrated corporate and media power, empowering consolidation that undermines local journalism and turning corporations into legal persons that flood politics with dark money. The court has issued rulings that weakened labor unions, eroded voting protections, and annulled the federally recognized right to abortion. A recent decision declared the president largely immune from legal accountability, eroding constitutional checks. Other institutions and actors have contributed to national crises, but the court’s decisions have made those harms structurally enforceable. The conservative majority's longevity raises the prospect of continued, long-term judicial transformation of American democratic institutions.

Read at The Nation