The Supreme Court isn't only on the ballot in this election, it has remade the ballot

Yesterday, it was leaked that President Biden is considering a few soft-core reforms of the Supreme Court, including an enforceable ethics code and term limits for justices. The Republican Party has spent 50 years getting the Supreme Court the way they want it, and they’re not going to let go of it.  Period. 

Donald Trump didn’t even wait for Biden to make his proposal public before throwing a fit on his social media account, accusing Biden of “playing the refs”:

This is what he means by “sacred”: Every single Supreme Court term since Republican appointees took over the majority, the court has announced a new slate of major cases to decide that will undo the legacy of previous courts in the areas of voting rights, guns, government regulation, abortion, racial preferences in college admissions…you name it.  They’ve gone right down the line overturning everything that has come before.

Now they’re going to go after gender identity and LGBTQ rights — again.  The right-wing lawsuit-generator, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Stephen Miller’s twin non-profit, America First Legal, are already actively looking for cases to roll back Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized gay sex, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to same sex marriage.  They won’t stop there.  Somewhere in a high-rise in Dallas or an office park outside Atlanta, there are busy little graduates of Liberty University School of Law looking for ways to overturn Brown v. Board of Education, which forbade segregated public schools, and Griswold v. Connecticut, which recognized a constitutional right to privacy in finding that laws against the sale and possession of contraceptives were unconstitutional.  Would they dare to target Loving v. Virginia, the unanimous Supreme Court case that struck down laws forbidding interracial marriage?  You bet they will. 

Why are they so afraid of same sex marriage and interracial marriage?  They have been yelling about the so-called Great Replacement Theory since Trump took office in 2017 – remember the all-white torch-carrying mob in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” as they protested taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee?  That wasn’t an aberration.  It was a movement peeking out from behind the skirts of the Republican Party.

Right now, at the Republican Convention, speaker after speaker is yelling about Biden letting immigrants across the border so they can vote.  It’s a lie, of course.  They know that.  What they are afraid of is immigrants who are undocumented today but may become citizens at some point in the future.  And what they’re really afraid of are the children of immigrants who are born citizens under the birthright citizenship provision of the 14^th Amendment. There are already calls on the Right to repeal the birthright citizenship clause of the 14^th Amendment.  They’d love to find a way to go after the due-process clause in the same amendment which was cited in Griswold and other cases establishing a right to privacy in your bedroom as well as in your choice of marriage partners. 

Let’s put it this way:  they are engaged in a wholesale campaign to roll back Supreme Court precedents until they’ve got the clock turned back not just to the 1950’s but to the 1920’s, if not to the 1890’s.  Some off-the-reservation Republican running for Congress with the support of Donald Trump in Michigan announced that women having the vote “hurt America” in 2022.  He lost, and they shoved him in the closest closet they could find while scrambling to distance themselves from him, but the damage was done.  This is the kind of extremist ideology that lies behind every single Republican effort to use the Supreme Court to turn back the clock.

The Republican Party is all too aware of the demographic shift that is on the horizon, when in 15 or 20 years, white people will become a minority in the United States. One of the big reasons they went after control of the Supreme Court was the inevitability of this demographic change.  The last two times the census was taken, interracial and interethnic marriage rates increased.  According to the Census Bureau, “The percentage of married-couple households that are interracial or interethnic grew across the United States from 7.4 to 10.2 percent from 2000 to 2012-2016.”  The largest increase was seen in marriages between non-Hispanic whites married to Hispanics, “which increased in 43.2 percent of counties,” according to the Census Bureau.  The largest increases were in Hawaii and Oklahoma, with nearly comparable rises in the mid-Atlantic states, including Virginia and North Carolina.  Florida also showed a large increase in interracial and interethnic marriages.

These are statistics that clearly sent chills down the spines of republican “strategists.”  It is no mistake that the man behind America First Law, the group that has filed many of the court challenges that are finding their way to the Supreme Court, is the biggest anti-immigrant of them all, Stephen Miller, who is said to be under consideration for an even more powerful role in a new Trump administration than he had in the last one.

Miller and his ilk are behind Trump’s plan to round-up tens of millions of undocumented immigrants, put them in concentration camps, run them through a speeded-up deportation process, and then expel them from the country. 

The Republican Party is afraid of immigrants.  They know what the birth rates are for white people as opposed to Hispanic immigrants and among other ethnic groups.  The numbers are running against the white male patriarchy that has had a stranglehold on power in this country since Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence at his desk on the plantation where he owned more than 200 slaves. 

The Supreme Court as it is currently constituted is part of the Republican long-term plan to hold onto power in this country.  The court has already made it more difficult for Black people to vote in the South and for people in general to vote everywhere.  They passed Citizens United so that corporations would be free to spend as much money as they want to influence elections.  They stripped government regulators of much of their power to limit the free rein of corporations to do what they want with our air, water, drugs, food, and conditions for workers.   

With everything they’re doing to attract the votes of Blacks and Hispanics, they are learning just how hard it is for Republicans to get the votes of people who are naturally suspicious of them.  They passed Bruen to make sure that the people they care about will have unrestricted access to guns.  Trump v. United States tilted the balance among the branches of government toward the president and the Supreme Court, which gets to decide which acts of each president in the future are “official” and thus off limits to the rule of law.

Republicans have had a long-term plan to take over the Supreme Court and many of the rest of the courts in this country so they can maintain their grip on power no matter what the results are at the ballot box in future elections.  They’re not going to let go.

We are looking at a grim future when the Constitution which is supposed to protect us all will be used to protect and empower white males and exactly nobody else.  If you have black or brown skin, or you are attracted to your own sex, or you speak with an accent, or you have a womb in your body, you should be very, very worried.  This Supreme Court is out to make the “Handmaid’s Tale” look like it describes a time of moderation and equality.