This week, a conservative Supreme Court majority empowered Donald Trump to continue his racist Muslim travel ban, Texas Republicans to deliberately diminish the political power of nonwhite voters, and pro-life pregnancy crisis centers to withhold information about abortion services from their female patients. They also dealt a blow to the American labor movement in general and public-sector unions in particular.
The current conservative Supreme Court only exists because Senate Republicans nullified Barack Obama’s right to appoint justices, and the Electoral College vetoed the American electorate’s preferred 2016 presidential candidate. With Justice Kennedy retiring, the Court will become even more reliably conservative.
These awful decisions should be cause for concern among people who oppose racism, support the union movement, support voting rights, and support a woman’s right to an abortion. Trump will, of course, nominate a right-wing conservative like Justice Gorsuch whom he appointed last year and Roe v Wade may be overturned, among other things.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already announced that the Senate will vote on Trump’s nominee to replace Kennedy this fall. But wait a minute. For a year, McConnell in an unprecedented action refused to meet with or hold a hearing on Obama’s moderate nominee, supposedly because it was a presidential election year, and yet he is planning to go right ahead with the proceedings for Trump’s next nominee a few weeks before the midterm elections this year.
What do the Democrats have to say? I saw television interviews with two Democratic Senators about this situation—Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar. While each of these Senators showed concern about the Supreme Court vacancy, each in separate discussions said they would fight for “consensus candidates” for the Court and said nothing about fighting to force McConnell to follow the same procedure he did in 2016 and not consider a nominee until after the election.
One hour after Justice Scalia died in February 2016 McConnell announced that he would not allow consideration of a replacement for Scalia until after the election in November. And the best the Democrats can do now is hope for a consensus candidate?! This shows why the Republicans continue to win. It is not a fair fight.
For a long time I have wondered why Republicans are strong fighters and Democrats are not, and I have concluded that the Republicans care more about their issues than Democrats care about theirs. Is the answer to push for energized Democrats who will fight? That appears to be what happened in New York on Tuesday when a young issue-oriented challenger defeated a powerful Democratic incumbent in a primary.