1/ My starting point for #SupremeCourt jurisprudence since 2000 is a telling quote from Joel Klein's "The Natural" in which a Republican Senator concedes to Clinton that Republicans don't believe in government, but they love power.
2/2000: #BushvGore, the Supreme Court stays the Florida recount with any opinion justifying the stay and then reverses the Fla. Supreme Court recount order as violating the Equal Protection Clause in a per curiam opinion that can't be cited as precedent.
3/2002: President Bush signed the #McCainFeingold campaign finance reform law, which foolishly included a restriction on the use of independent expenditures for commercials 60 days before an election.
4/ 2010: In #CitizensUnited, that provision was challenged. Rather than issue a narrow ruling that kept intact a law the court upheld in 2003, Chief Justice Roberts engineered a 5-4 ruling that invalidated all restrictions on independent expenditures. newyorker.com/magazine/2012/…
5/ 2006 - Congress overwhelmingly reauthorizes the #VotingRightsAct of 1965 (following 21 hearings and a legislative record that exceeded 15,000 pages) that required areas with a history of voting discrimination to submit election law changes to the Justice Dept for approval.
6/ 2013: #ShelbyCountyvHolder. In a 5-4 ruling, Roberts ignored a 15,000-page legislative record to declare there was no longer a need for DOJ pre-clearance opening the gate to voter suppression laws. bennetkelley.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/the…
7/ Despite the fact that the 2006 #VotingsRightsAct extension passed the Senate 98-0, once the #ShelbyCounty decision gave the green light for voter suppression in the age of Obama, Republicans abandoned support for voting rights altogether. washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/…
8/ 2016: Senate Republicans refuse to consider the March 2016 nomination of #MerrickGarland to the #SCOTUS claiming it is too close to the November 2016 presidential election and that the issue should be left to the voters. washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost…
9/ In August 2020, the Republicans renominate Donald Trump for President without adopting a platform. The party had abandoned any pretense of being interested in policy or government, but instead merely cared about #power and holding on to it.
10/ 2020: The Republican Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett ONLY SIX DAYS before the presidential election. Barrett, Trump's third Justice, had previously called for #RoevWade to be overturned and to end its “barbaric legacy”. brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/20…
11/ With Barrett's confirmation, she became the third Supreme Court justice who had a role in supporting the Republican fight in #BushvGore where #power was the guiding principle. msnbc.com/all-in/watch/c…
12/ Barrett gave the court an anti-Roe majority which allowed the court to ignore at least 49 years of precedent to reverse Roe simply because they now had the votes. #Dobbs #RoeVWade
13/ Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor explain what was evident in #BushvGore and is also too transparent in #Dobbs: "#Power, not reason, is the new currency of the Court's decisionmaking."
14/ Remember when the GOP cried for judicial restraint? Guess again, these unelected legislators for life are not done. In #Dobbs, Justice Thomas calls for a reconsideration of decisions finding a right to privacy, invalidating sodomy laws, and protecting gay marriage.
15/ Justice Gorsuch is dying to invalidate the #ChevronDoctrine in which the Court gives deference to an agency's interpretation of the statute it enforces. Doing so would enable the Court to undo environmental regs, a goal of Gorsuch's mother.
16/ The decision in #Dobbs teaches us that this activist Court will abandon #staredecisis and ignore precedents if they have the votes to do so and it favors the Republican party and their base - simply because they have the #POWER and they can.
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