Thread by @pleasesaveour

50 years ago, Lewis Powell asked: What if American business took over the then-liberal Supreme Court and turned it into a defender of capitalism and large corporations?

ncadvertiser.com/opinion/articl…

Within months Nixon appointed Powell to the court.

Powell could hardly have predicted just how much success his vision would have over the next half-century, in almost every area of the law

nixonfoundation.org/2014/12/day-wi…

The Supreme Court would repeatedly rule in favor of corporations and the rich, and against the middle class and the poor — undermining unions, paving the way for lower taxes and generally playing an underappreciated role in reshaping the economy in ways that hurt working people.

Democratic presidential candidates and the media generally attribute growing inequality to policies adopted by Congress and presidents, and to larger forces like automation, but the Supreme Court deserves a sizable share of the blame.

washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nationa…

The transition in the court’s position on business-related issues has been dramatic. Businesses won 28% of their cases before the court led by CJ Earl Warren (over the period 1953 to 1969) but 64% under the current court, led by CJ John Roberts
digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/lawreview/vol4…

Another found that Justice Samuel Alito and Roberts are the No. 1 and No. 2 most pro-business justices, respectively, to serve since 1946.

slideshare.net/wyakab/world-i…

The court’s past half-century of favoring the rich and powerful coincides almost exactly with the period when the richest Americans have left the rest of the nation behind. The “World Inequality Report 2018,” identified two chief drivers of economic inequality in the US:

unequal educational opportunity and an increasingly regressive tax system. The modern court has contributed greatly to both.

The court’s role as a force for inequality started a few years before the Powell memo — in 1969, when Nixon became president.

reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_le…

Nixon shared the business community’s skepticism toward the Warren court, and he campaigned on a promise to change it. That court had spent the past 15 years promoting civil rights, starting with Brown v. Board of Education

history.com/topics/black-h…

and expanding the rights of poor Americans, with rulings like Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections

oyez.org/cases/1965/48

In Nixon’s first three years in office, he appointed 4 justices. Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, William Rehnquist and Powell — were more sympathetic to big business than their predecessors.

verdict.justia.com/2014/07/25/nix…

The ways in which the court drove inequality were wide-ranging. In 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo, it held for the first time that money is First Amendment-protected speech and struck down limits on spending in political campaigns.

oyez.org/cases/1975/75-…

In labor law, the court turned against unions — a trend that reached its nadir in 2018 with Janus v. AFSCME, which held that government unions cannot require nonmembers to pay fees for being represented in collective bargaining.

supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf…

Most important, however, were the court’s decisions concerning education and desegregation. They overturned many local cases that would prevent segregation and ruled that the courts were powerless to act

law.justia.com/cases/federal/…

Rodriguez and Milliken entrenched inequality deeply in American education. The quality of the education that children receive today depends to a great extent on how much money their district has, and the gaps in funding among districts in a single state can be enormous.

A dramatic example of the contemporary court’s attitude toward the poor came in 2012, when it narrowly upheld most of the Affordable Care Act. Yet in the same ruling, the court limited the law’s Medicaid expansion
kff.org/health-reform/…

If Trump is reelected and replaces even one lib justice, a larger conserv maj could go much further. The court could strike down ACA — it agreed last month to hear a case challenging it — and continue the deconstruct of the safety net that poor and middle-class Americans rely on

for example, by holding that Congress lacks the constitutional authority to pass sweeping laws like the federal minimum wage)
americanprogress.org/issues/courts/…

In his 1971 memorandum, Powell warned that business interests were “under broad attack” and urged them to be “more aggressive.” Today, however, most Americans believe that it’s ordinary people who need protection against big corporations and plutocrats.

The public may not fully grasp the role the court has played in exacerbating inequality. But Democratic presidential candidates may find a receptive audience if they explain that connection — and promise voters a court that puts ordinary Americans ahead of the 1%
#PresidentBiden

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