Republicans are not the victors of a tumultuous week of campaigning in which President Joe Biden flubbed his first debate and former President Donald Trump won a landmark Supreme Court ruling — the oligarchy is. New analysis holds.
Slate writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on Wednesday presented an alternative to the prevailing political narrative that Biden’s campaign collapses while a Trump recently disciplined reap the profit.
Instead of looking political parties in the eye, they raise the spectre of Supreme Court rulings that they say demonstrate cataclysmic governmental change.
“Make no mistake about it,” the two write, “when a court that has been battered almost weekly by reports of undisclosed oligarch-funded vacations (and gifts and superyachts and souped-up RVs and secret conferences with high-paid Koch supporters who have access to the judges) decides to make it easier to bribe public officials, as it did in Snyder v. US, that is a very public signal that the conservative supermajority doesn’t care what you think.”
Slate’s editorial shifts its focus away from the red-blue showdown and toward the growing powers that the country’s political elite is said to have wrested from the federal government.
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The Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity was just one of many rulings that they say dismantle checks and balances and channel power to an empowered epicenter of government.
“Republican Supreme Court appointees are sympathetic to wealthy individuals and corporations, so they will bend the law to help them,” Lithwick and Stern write.
“The Court has placed itself at the top of the state, agreeing to share power only with a strong president who seeks to govern according to the vision of conservative justices.”
The couple argues that federal controls were dismantled in three little-known rulings issued last week, one of which eliminated a statute of limitations for Challenges of government regulation and another one mandate that courts rely on the agencies’ technical expertise — endanger the basic needs of daily American life.
“This is how American government has operated for more than a century, to the great benefit of the citizenry,” Lithwick and Stern write.
“That is why we have clean, drinkable air, water, planes that fly, and drugs that do not kill us.”
Unfortunately, while both present their readers with a specific vision of an impending catastrophic future, they offer no details about what viable solution it might entail.
“Public outrage has made the court more reckless,” the Slate authors conclude. “The time for wishful thinking about the power of shame, institutional legitimacy, and historical legacy is past. The time to act may be now or never.”
