July 20, 2022
Page 9
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o piNioN
Taking Back the Supreme Court
Long term project
starts with next election
By Ben Jealous
Did you ever wonder whether elec-
tions really matter? Well, the Trump Su-
preme Court majority has answered that
question for good.
Or, more accurately, they have an-
swered it for bad.
In the term that has just ended, the new
far right-wing majority on the Supreme
Court went on a rampage. They have torn
up decades of legal precedent to dimin-
ish Americans’ rights and legal protec-
tions. To justify the results they wanted,
they lied in their rulings the way some of
them lied to get on the court. It has been
a shameful display of power politics dis-
guised as judging.
Not surprisingly, the most attention has
been paid to the Court majority overturn-
ing the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision.
A constitutional right that has made a huge
difference in the lives of generations of
women was wiped away. The impact will
be devastating and deadly.
Millions of individuals and couples
dealing with unwanted pregnancies, the
trauma of rape or incest, life-threatening
pregnancy complications, or even a mis-
carriage that some intrusive government
official decides is suspicious, will have
their options severely limited or elimi-
nated entirely.
We know that those restrictions and
their consequences will fall most harshly
Ben Jealous
on already vulnerable people, including
Black people, LGBTQ+ people, people
with disabilities, and low-income people.
Already in Missouri, a major health care
system will no longer treat rape victims
with emergency contraception because the
state abortion ban puts medical care pro-
viders at legal risk.
Anti-abortion state legislators seem to
be in competition to see who can pass the
most extreme, intrusive, and controlling
laws. Some are even trying to limit peo-
ple’s right to travel from one state to
another, targeting anyone who helps a
person from a state that bans abortion
get care in a state that permits it. It re-
minds me of the old fugitive slave laws
that forced free states to help slave states
deny people their freedom.
Unfortunately, overturning Roe is just
one of the harmful decisions handed down
by the Trump Court.
The Court intervened in voting rights
cases to protect gerrymandering designed
to limit Black voters’ access to political
power. This comes on top of other rulings
gutting the Voting Rights Act.
The Trump Court went after sensible
regulation of guns. The far-right justices
overturned a New York law more than
100 years old that required people to
show a good cause to get a permit to car-
ry concealed firearms. Communities that
are already suffering from the effects of
gun crime are likely to experience even
greater violence now that the court has
robbed public officials of options and
given the extremist pro-gun political
agenda the power of law.
The court also further dismantled the
separation of church and state, which
protects religious freedom and preserves
equality under law for people regardless
of their religious beliefs. The Trump
court took a wrecking ball to this pillar
of American society. It is forcing states
to divert tax dollars to religious schools,
like some southern states did when they
funded white evangelical segregationist
academies that emerged in resistance to
the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of
Education decision outlawing racially
segregated public schools. This court has
made it easier for public officials, like
teachers, to coerce students into prayer
or other religious practices. This is a
very clear threat to anyone whose faith is
different from the one dominant in their
community or state.
In other words, the U.S. Supreme
Court, which we counted on for genera-
tions to uphold civil rights and tear down
obstacles to equality, is now acting as an
arm of the increasingly aggressive far-
right political movement.
How did we get here? Simple. Thanks
to the anti-democratic Electoral College,
Donald Trump was elected in 2016 even
though almost three million more Amer-
icans voted for Hillary Clinton. Repub-
lican Senate leader Mitch McConnell
prevented the Senate from even consid-
ering President Barack Obama’s Supreme
Court nomination so that Trump could fill
it instead—and then rushed Trump’s third
justice onto the court even as voters were
casting ballots to remove Trump from of-
fice. Behind Trump and McConnell was
a massively funded, decades-long cam-
paign to build the political power to take
control of the judiciary.
In other words, winning the presiden-
cy and controlling the Senate gave the
far right the power to force its harmful
agenda on the American public long after
voters rejected Trump. Taking the Court
back from the extremists who now con-
trol it will be a long-term project. It starts
with this year’s elections.
Ben Jealous serves as president of People
For the American Way and Professor of the
Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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