NINE BLACK ROBES

The senior Supreme Court analyst for CNN examines the current court and the elemental dangers it poses.

It wasn’t long after being installed that Trump’s three appointees to the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—began to pull the institution hard to the right, joining Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in an openly evident program to dismantle abortion rights and LGBTQ+ equality. “This court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” Barrett remarked, but all signs point to the contrary even if the justices collectively, at least, repudiated Trump in his quest to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory. Indeed, writes Biskupic, Trump “treated the judiciary as if it were his to command, from his early weeks in office to his final weeks after he lost the 2020 election.” Of course, he had willing allies on the bench: Even if Clarence Thomas did not vote in Trump’s favor, he “showed sympathy for Trump’s claims of fraud,” influenced by his Trump-supporting, election-contesting wife, and has refused to recuse himself from cases involving tests of “independent state legislative theory that could collapse judicial safeguards.” On the latter point, Biskupic adds that Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh showed signs of being willing to entertain arguments in favor of state authority over federal elections—which, had it been in place, would have installed Trump. The court has taken to fighting “culture-war issues of guns and religion,” Biskupic notes, and is moving steadily to fulfill the right-wing desideratum of less and less federal regulation—as can be seen, for one, by its curtailing of some of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory powers. The court is likely to prove destructive by any progressive measure, she closes, “a majority laying waste to precedents and, indeed, offering no one confidence that it was done with its work.”

Court watchers and civil rights activists alike will find this essential—and disturbing—reading.