How to fight the SCOTUS war
Conservative Republicans, elated by the prospect of filling the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, are hellbent on tilting the court even further to the right. But Trump and his supporters should be careful what they wish for. Early indications suggest that the nomination fight has already lit a fire under Democratic activists, who are waking up to the realization that every major initiative on the party’s wish list — from protecting the Affordable Care Act to passing a Green New Deal — is likely to end up in federal court.
“If Democrats were guilty of not taking the Supreme Court seriously in the past, that is now over,” Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul told me recently. “The stakes are so extraordinarily high that Democrats from the left side of the party, to the moderate wing, to right of center Democrats, understand the significance of this next Supreme Court justice, because it is generational. What could happen to our country could have generational long term impacts.”
Hochul has been joining Zoom and in-person events around the state and across the nation, firing up local political clubs and influencers on behalf of Joe Biden and the Democratic ticket. Her pitch includes ticking off the major issues that have already landed before the high court and will likely show up again.
“Supporting health care, supporting reproductive health, supporting our climate, supporting people having voting rights access, limiting money in campaigns,” Hochul says. “Does anybody remember Citizens United [a landmark case in which the Supreme Court erased many limits on money in politics]? This is what you get when you have Republican-influenced Supreme Court nominees. That’s why Democrats need to wake up and say, ‘Yes, this is also something I’m going to care about.’ “
And Dems do care. Last Friday evening, in the hours after Ginsburg’s death was first reported, the Democratic Party’s ActBlue fund-raising website broke multiple records, taking in an average of $100,000 a minute and topping out at more than $91 million in the first 24 hours.
As NBC News notes, that enthusiasm gap tracks with the findings of recent polls by Marquette Law School, Fox News and CNN, which all found Democrats more enthusiastic about the importance of the Supreme Court than Republicans. Even more alarming for Republicans: A recent New York Times poll found that Dems more fired up about the court in key swing states including Arizona and North Carolina.
So Republicans may find that jamming a new conservative onto the high court will provide an incentive for the normally fractious, divided Democrats to put aside their differences and pull in the same direction in the run-up to Election Day. You could see the alliance of urgency in the joint press conference with 30-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez standing side by side with 69-year-old Sen. Chuck Schumer, the living embodiment of the Democratic establishment.
Progressives like Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation magazine, have been calling for Dems to coalesce around court appointments. “There is not a progressive, liberal or center-left policy that survives Trump getting two more Supreme Court justices to replace Ginsburg and Breyer, nothing,” Mystal told me. “You want climate change action? It’s not going to happen. You want some gun reform legislation? It’s not going to happen.”
Mystal says, accurately, that capturing Supreme Court seats has not been a high priority for Democrats. “The Democratic leaders in our party do not do a good job of explaining to people, especially our young people, just how critical the courts are — versus the Republicans, who have, for a generation, told their base voters, their young voters, that there’s nothing that they can have without having the Supreme Court.”
And if Dems needed any more incentive, Hochul is reminding younger voters that the Supreme Court ended up settling the outcome of the close election of 2000 — and could end up doing so again this year.
“Remember, [in 2000] the Supreme Court stopped the counting and said, ‘It’s over. We’re done,’ “she says. In Trump, she says, “we have a president who has basically telegraphed that he will stop at nothing to hijack this election, steal this election, if it turns out he is not the winner. I wouldn’t be surprised if he physically shut down every post office and removed every mailbox on the street corner to make sure that people can’t vote.”
Having spent decades convincing the public to take a chance on universal health care and battling climate change, Democrats should spend more time after the elections — win or lose — educating voters against the specter of seeing their big dreams distorted, deferred or defeated by an aging, hostile court.