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Tag: ruth bader ginsburg
U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court's Approval Rating Drops To Lowest Level Ever

More than two years of highly unpopular decisions and months of exposés detailing scandals and alleged corruption has eroded the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval to its lowest level ever in the years in which Gallup has been tracking it. It dropped from 62 percent in 2000, the first year of the survey, to just 40 percent today. It had a 58 percent approval rating in 2020, before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the installation of Donald Trump’s appointee, Amy Coney Barrett. It’s been mostly downhill for the court’s approval since.

The court has been on a spree of unprecedented and radical actions over the last two and a half years, reversing decades of court precedent on abortion, voting rights, civil rights, environmental protection, executive authority, labor law—you name it, up to and including the foundational principles of the Constitution. If the court could reverse a century’s worth of progress in some arena of our public and private lives, they’d do it. For the first year of Trump-appointee dominance on the court, they didn’t even bother to hold hearings on a lot of it. They just tore up decades of progress in the “emergency” or “shadow docket,” where they could do it anonymously and with absolutely no transparency.

Those actions clearly had an effect on the court’s approval rating. There was a brief blip of increased approval—up to 43% in 2022—that was erased this year by the onslaught of scandals and apparent corruption by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

That includes extensive ProPublica reporting on Thomas: the luxurious vacations, the real estate deals including his mother living rent- and mortgage-free in her newly renovated home, and the private school tuition for Thomas’ nephew, all from Harlan Crow, a billionaire mega-donor to the Republican Party. That’s without even considering the involvement of Thomas’ wife, Ginni, in the January 6 insurrection.

Alito hasn’t escaped ProPublica’s investigative eye either. It reported on his private, luxurious, and all-expense-paid fishing trip in which he hung out with a hedge fund manager who has had business before the Supreme Court, cases he heard and ruled on. Other outlets have followed its lead. CNN has investigated Alito’s celebration of overturning abortion rights with his all-expenses paid trip to Rome. Alito’s efforts to slap back at those stories and declare, incorrectly, that he is beyond the reach of Congress aren’t likely to resonate with any neutral observer among the public.

The court isn’t elected, so what the people think of them isn’t of direct concern to the justices. However, the people who have the power to regulate the court are elected, and thus have every interest in dealing with the problem. So perhaps the justices shouldn’t be too smug about their untouchability.

If any of them (cough, Chief Justice John Roberts, cough) truly care about the institution, they’ll see the threat to it in the growing lack of confidence and trust in the court, particularly right now when the rule of law in the nation is on such precarious ground thanks to an insurrectionist former president.

That’s where Roberts might take note of this new result from Gallup because it surveyed his personal approval rating for the first time in eight years. His approval has been relatively flat for the last decade, and now he sits at 43 percent approval. What’s changed is the chunk of the population that is paying enough attention to the court, and to Roberts, to have an opinion about him. In 2015, 44 percent of respondents simply didn’t know enough about him to weigh in with an opinion. This month, that was down to 27 percent.

If you’re a chief justice of the Supreme Court, you don’t want your work to be rising to the level of general public scrutiny. You’re better off with the court not making so much news—particualrly bad news—that more people are paying attention. You really don’t want that ahead of an election year in which your court and its lack of ethics is going to be a key issue.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Harnessing Women's Power To Preserve And Protect The Rule Of Law

Harnessing Women's Power To Preserve And Protect The Rule Of Law

Excerpted from Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

The 2020 election story ended with Americans waking up on the morning of January 6, 2021, to the news that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had won their respective runoff races. But within just a few hours, insurrectionists would be scaling the walls of the US Capitol, attempting to decertify Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. People would die. The seat of government would be trashed. Elected members ran for their lives and hid in their offices. Donald Trump would later fete the insurrectionists as peaceful patriots. In time, they would be hailed as freedom fighters.

Within a few short weeks, states like Georgia and Texas were passing the most draconian voter suppression bills in the country. Other states hastily followed suit. Although the amount of in-person vote fraud was negligible in the 2020 election, as it has been for decades— as even Attorney General Bill Barr acknowledged—under cover of “election protection,” in the first months of 2021, 18 states enacted more than 30 laws restricting access to the ballot. Projections suggest around 36 million people, or about 15 percent of all eligible voters, will be affected. Under false claims of bolstering voter confidence in election integrity, states would try to cancel "souls to the polls" Sunday voting and would impose onerous new ID requirements. Georgia would make it illegal to bring food or water to voters standing in long lines. Partisan poll watchers would be empowered to harass voters.

In the most dangerous move, new powers to set aside election results are being bestowed on state legislatures, with authority removed from nonpartisan election officials. Some states have arrogated new powers over election administration and certification and authorized election “audits” that will be used to discredit the 2022 and 2024 elections. The GOP has purged moderates or those who question the proposition that Trump won in 2020 from party leadership. Republican senators have filibustered national voting rights legislation from even being debated. And a growing spirit of vigilantism has allowed citizens to take law enforcement into their own hands, from Texas’s SB-8 enforcement, to stand your ground laws, to state- sanctioned harassment of school officials.

This is horrible, if largely invisible. In many ways, the rule of law feels more fragile in 2022 than it seemed during the Trump years, but voters, including women, seem to be suffering from what some activists have dubbed the Great Forgetting: an abiding desire to relegate the Trump craziness to the ash heap of history; the blind belief that activism saved the country and will prevail in the future; and the assessment that because “the system held” in 2020, it must be magic. None of that is true. About one-third of all voters (and 78 percent of Republicans) believe the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden and that those who stormed the Capitol in January 2021 are heroes. State election officials and politicians are openly campaigning for 2022 and 2024 on The Big Lie.

I am not sure why, in the face of this sort of existential threat to democracy, it feels as if so many of us have fallen asleep. COVID and partisanship have surely exhausted us all. Maybe that’s why these women lawyers seem more essential than ever to my mind. Their voices and pleadings play out on a loop in my ears late at night— demanding basic dignity, family autonomy, bodily integrity, and other values enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. They hold on to our memories when we all just want to forget and move on.

Robbie Kaplan and Karen Dunn kept the Charlottesville torch march of 2017 alive for four years. Stacey Abrams kept the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia burning for two. I sometimes cling to the fanciful notion that one of the special points of connection between women and the law is that the law’s slow, measured progress allows it to preserve histories that might otherwise be erased. That recasts these Trump resistance attorneys as modern-day Philomelas, weaving the details of long-forgotten crimes into a tapestry so that it may stand as evidence.

Mary Beard opens her book Women and Power: A Manifesto with Penelope from The Odyssey, whose son, Telemachus, scolds her for speaking out in the great hall of her palace. He tells her to “go back up to your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff,” and reminds her that “speech will be the business of men, all men, and me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.” Penelope, too, scoots off to her loom. Perhaps all of this looming of the truth is an ancient female response to being silenced. But it also leads back to what Vanita Gupta and Stacey Abrams keep saying about women and the accumulation of power. Abrams talks compulsively about power. The paperback Abrams published in 2019 is titled Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change, a protracted meditation on power and how to build it and use it: “The questions for those in search of power abound: Who has it? How do we get and wield it? What do we do when we have less than the other guy? What do we do when we lose it?”

Beard writes about why contemporary notions of power still exclude women and why “women are still perceived as belonging out- side power.” She says we still cling to models (thanks, Telemachus) of power as something “elite, coupled to public prestige, to the individual charisma of so-called ‘leadership’” that almost always comes with celebrity. (Thanks, cowboys!) Beard imagines structural changes to how we think about power, “decoupling it from public prestige,” and it seems to me that the law has emerged as a system that does exactly that. Framed in the ways leaders like Gupta, Hill, and Abrams describe, law and power can blossom and grow, far from the klieg lights of reality TV.

The women lawyers and organizers who sprang up in opposition to Trump and Trumpism seem to be a natural experiment in adopting Beard’s broader prescription for power, which demands “thinking about the power of followers, not just of leaders.” For Beard, that means, above all, “thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession.” The women who used the law to save democracy since 2016 taught us how “to power.” They both modeled and harnessed the “power of followers,” whether it was women protesting the travel ban and family separations or getting out the vote. Women organizing around halting mass shootings, promoting reproductive freedoms, and opposing white supremacy were also lashing the power of groups to the power of law; it was the furthest thing from a president who was announcing whimsical executive orders via Twitter and fomenting violence through mobs.

We are in a truly frightening moment. Election deniers are laying the tracks to set aside the 2024 election and the Supreme Court has, for the first time in history, reversed precedent in order to take away freedom rather than expand it. Justice Samuel Alito produced an opinion in Dobbs in which women were imaginary and fetal personhood was real. He told us to vote if we didn’t like it, even as the court works ever harder to limit voting rights. Gun massacres of school children seem to continue unabated. Yet in 2022, the Supreme Court expanded gun rights substantially. States punish LGBTQ families and ban books in schools. The Supreme Court will hear a case affording state legislatures the right to determine election outcomes; the discredited legal theory deployed to try to set aside the 2020 contest. This will not be reversed in a year or maybe even a decade. But I don’t believe women sleep through revanchist backsliding any easier than they sleep through colic. We hear things, we see things. We are awake.

Just as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg unfailingly name-checked Pauli Murray, Stacey Abrams never fails to mention Helen Butler, Nsé Ufot, Debo- rah Scott, Tamieka Atkins, Atlanta’s mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, LaTosha Brown, and the women who work alongside her. After Biden was sworn in, Vanita Gupta was chosen and confirmed (by a single vote) as associate attorney general of the United States, overseeing the Justice Department’s civil rights litigation as well as its antitrust, civil, and environmental divisions. She, too, is scrupulous in highlighting the communities and organizations that do the work in the trenches. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, told us she stood on the shoulders of Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman ever seated as a federal judge.

Throughout the Trump years, women who were asking themselves, “What can I do?” learned that whether we notice it or not, the law organizes every part of our lives. Lashing ourselves to legal ideas, movements, and causes gave us power. It organized us. It focused us. It connected us to first principles and lofty ideas. And every step of the way, the wins felt tangible and material and enduring. Women have come so far in a few decades, and the law, even with its flaws and its anachronisms, has been a quiet, persistent source of order and meaning in a world that feels ever more out of our control. It’s been a source of power beyond just rage. We have a long way to go, the road will be bumpy, and the destination still feels less than clear. But women plus law equals magic; we prove that every day. And bearing witness to what it can and will achieve has been the great privilege of my lifetime.

Dahlia Lithwick is the senior legal correspondent at Slate and host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. In 2013 she won a National Magazine Award for her columns on the Affordable Care Act.

Excerpted from Lady Justice, copyright 2022 by Dahlia Lithwick, published by Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Random House.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks next to former President Trump, left.

Justice Barrett Doesn’t Want You To Think She’s A ‘Partisan Hack’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court whose nomination was rammed through the Senate by then-Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, on Sunday told guests invited to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, "My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks."

She was roundly criticized and mocked for that claim, which was reported by the Louisville Courier Journal.

Barrett was nominated immediately after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, before she had even been buried. She was confirmed one week before the November 2020 election in a 52-48 vote, entirely on party lines, and sworn in the very next day, all thanks to the efforts of Senator Mitch McConnell. McConnell in 2016 infamously blocked President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, from even getting a committee hearing, then pushed through Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh before Barrett's nomination.

Here's Senator McConnell celebrating Barrett's confirmation, which indeed was on former U.S. Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's birthday:

The court now sits with a 6-3 highly-conservative majority, and some across the country feel several of the conservatives have flouted judicial ethics by weighing in on issues, directly or in directly. Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas, is a far right wing lobbyist who used to run a Tea Party organization. She is believed to have had a hand in President Donald Trump's expulsion of transgender service members from the U.S. Armed Forces. And Justice Kavanaugh, infamously during his Senate confirmation hearing, infamously threatened revenge against Democrats.

In fact, as Amy Coney Barrett was being sworn in, The New Republic published an opinion piece stating she and Justice Kavanaugh "have demonstrated this week that they should be thought of as political operatives, not justices."

Barrett of course brought this perception on herself, allowing her nomination to be pushed through in the weeks before a highly controversial presidential election, appearing at a super-spreader event at the White House celebrating her nomination, then later standing on the White House balcony with President Trump, days before the election, all of which effectively worked as an endorsement of his re-election.

Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes noted at the time just how unprecedented this single act was:

Many are mocking Barrett's claim.










RBG Was Denied Top Funeral Honors By Mitch McConnell, New Book Reports

RBG Was Denied Top Funeral Honors By Mitch McConnell, New Book Reports

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to honor the liberal hero by allowing her to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

The story is included in Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power, a forthcoming book by USA Today journalist Susan Page.

Page writes that Speaker Pelosi sought to make Ginsburg the first woman to lie in state in the Rotunda.

The website of the Architect of the Capitol says of use of the premises to honor those who have died: "No law, written rule, or regulation specifies who may lie in state; use of the U.S. Capitol Rotunda is controlled by concurrent action of the House and Senate. Any person who has rendered distinguished service to the nation may lie in state if the family so wishes and Congress approves."

But according to Page, "McConnell rejected the idea on the grounds that there was no precedent for such treatment of a justice."

Instead, Pelosi allowed Ginsburg's coffin to lie in state in Statuary Hall, located on the House side of the Capitol.

McConnell did not attend the service honoring Ginsburg, and later ignored her dying wish that her replacement be nominated by the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

McConnell rushed through Donald Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court days before the election, despite having refused even to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama's nominee to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016, on the grounds that it was too close to an election to confirm the sitting president's choice.

"Mitch McConnell is not a force for good in our country," Page reports that Pelosi said. "He is an enabler of some of the worst stuff, and an instigator of some of it on his own."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.