Why such a fuss about the Supreme Court?

In the next few weeks and months, a noisy battle is going to rage in the US, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker, as Democrats try to block the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Their chances of success are minimal – they don’t have enough votes in the Senate. Yet even if it’s hopeless, it’s important that anyone with “a sense of fairness and history” registers a strong protest. Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment to the ninemember court will give the body an unassailable conservative majority for the first time in decades. The Right has been laying the groundwork for this moment for a long time and will seek to make the most of it. Stand by for a concerted attempt to roll back women’s rights and workers’ rights, along with other reactionary rulings.

So much for the idea that the US is a democracy, said Ezra Klein on Vox. Trump only won the election owing to the quirks of an electoral college system that these days weights votes in a way that disadvantages the Democrats (he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots). Now he can rely on the Supreme Court, which already leans to the Right and has made several rulings on electoral issues such as gerrymandering that favour the GOP. The court has become “a partisan tool for undermining democracy”.

Give me a break, said Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. Talk of Kavanaugh’s nomination representing an “emergency” for US democracy is “hysterical” nonsense. Kavanaugh may be conservative, but he’s no raving ideologue. Last week, his old professor at Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, a Clinton supporter, defended him in the press, praising his intellect and unbiased judgement. Kavanaugh is supremely qualified, said Amar, and the best candidate Democrats could have hoped for from a Republican president. The reason the Left is so upset, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post, is that they’ve long used rulings by activist judges in the Supreme Court as a “shortcut” to achieve progressive policies, such as gay marriage, that they couldn’t win by normal democratic means. But the court is now firmly under the control of judges who believe their job is “to interpret the laws, not make them”. If Democrats want to regain power and push their liberal agenda, “they’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way – by winning elections. That is, if they still believe in elections.”