More Than A Magazine, A Movement
It’s a bittersweet time to reflect on President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s legacy for our federal courts.
On one hand, this administration and Senate majority are unrivaled in adding diversity to the federal bench. On the other hand, Biden and Schumer are now falling behind Trump and McConnell’s pace of confirmations.
Let’s confirm the president’s nominees and fill the vacancies where obstruction is impossible.
In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled along political lines that it could not review disputes over partisan gerrymandering. The conservatives in Rucho v. Common Cause insisted that the question of how state legislatures draw their maps is a “political” question and thus “nonjusticiable” by the Court.
The truth is more that the Court silenced the Constitution and set our democracy on a destructive course. As Justice Kagan wrote in the liberals’ dissent, the Court had “encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction.” The resulting “unchecked” gerrymanders, she warned, “may irreparably damage our system of government.”
In 2014, Justice Samuel Alito allegedly leaked the impending decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby to anti-choice lobbyists weeks before the Court publicly issued it. This revelation suggests something more sinister: Some of the justices are acting in concert with conservative movement leaders, leaking opinions, signaling outcomes, and backchanneling. This is disturbing and devastating. The rule of law cannot survive if the judiciary ceases to be independent.
Just 6 percent of U.S. appeals court judges have represented workers—but two-thirds of these judges have experience representing corporations. This is not the system working people deserve.
Adding more economic justice judges to the bench will help protect families and unrig our nation’s immense wealth inequalities.
Instead of celebrating the president’s historic commitment to picking the nation’s first Black woman justice, conservatives have already made up their minds that Biden’s choice of a Black woman makes her automatically unqualified.
What reactionary conservatives can’t be bothered to ask is: Why hasn’t there been a Black woman Supreme Court justice in the history of the United States?
