The Supreme Court Only Cares About the Wealthy and Powerful
If you don’t already have money and power, the current Supreme Court majority doesn’t care about you. That must be our major takeaway from the 2023–24 term, because it not only explains almost every egregious decision the Court made, but also speaks to why the current ethics corruption on the Court is such an urgent concern.
Consider the underreported case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the Court gave cities the green light to criminalize homelessness. With this permission, any city can now pass an ordinance like Grants Pass’s law banning sleeping outside, potentially forcing unhoused people to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Fulfilling a basic human need — sleep — has become a reason for incarceration.
At the same time that individuals may now struggle to find a place to lay their head without being arrested for it, the Court is allowing corporations to further dirty the air they must breathe, blocking air pollution protections in Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA had instituted a policy called the Good Neighbor Plan to make sure states don’t have to be subjected to downwind pollution generated in other states. The states that want to generate this pollution challenged the policy, and the Court blocked it before the lower courts could even fully litigate the case.
The juxtaposition between these two cases is harsh. Polluters get an instant win, while unhoused people are left with no solutions for basic survival. What we see in case after case is that those who want to abuse their power win, while any attempts to protect against that abuse lose.
That’s obviously true in the outrageous presidential immunity decision in Trump v. United States, which invited presidents to be authoritarians, as well as Trump v. Anderson, which eliminated pathways to keep insurrectionists off the ballot. But it’s also true in the multiple cases that have gutted the government’s ability to hold the wealthy and powerful accountable.
Thanks to Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) v. Jarkesy, the SEC — and potentially any other agency — can no longer hold law violators accountable without taking every single case to a jury trial. Not only would that overwhelm the courts, but it would hamstring the agencies’ enforcement of our laws because they simply wouldn’t have the capacity to litigate all those cases.
But even that’s granting the premise that the agencies are allowed to function at all. By overturning Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court stole power away from the experts to hoard it for itself. Now that it has the power to block any agency action, we’ll face an avalanche of new lawsuits from wealthy and powerful conservatives — not unlike in the EPA case — seeking to block any government restriction they don’t like, and the conservative majority on this Court will be the final word.
We cannot tolerate any delusion that this Court is objective or impartial.
And if you do have wealth and access to the powerful, your ability to exercise influence over state and local officials just got even easier. In Snyder v. United States, the Court held that federal bribery law only prevents paying off officials if the quid comes before the quo. If payment simply comes after the desired action is taken, it’s called a “gratuity” instead of a bribe, and it’s perfectly legal to “reward” officials in this way. We know how much some of the justices — but especially Justice Clarence Thomas — appreciate receiving “gifts” from their conservative billionaire “friends.”
But if you simply want your vote to count, tough luck. In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the Supreme Court greenlit South Carolina’s racially gerrymandered maps simply because they also happened to also be politically gerrymandered — not at all by coincidence.
Want to keep your family together? Too bad, the Supreme Court said in Department of State v. Muñoz that if you marry someone who’s not a citizen, you don’t have a right to keep them in the U.S. with you and the children you might have together.
Even in the cases where the Court appeared not to do harm, they did little to help us. By punting in the cases related to the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, doctors in states with abortion bans will be left with legal uncertainty as to whether they can provide pregnant patients with the care they need to prevent permanent damage or even death. And while the Court dismissed a challenge to the safe and effective abortion drug mifepristone (FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine), it did little to protect the drug from future challenges.
We’re also no safer from gun violence. The Court may have ruled in United States v. Rahimi that guns can be taken away from those under domestic violence restraining orders, but it did little to clarify its expansive ruling from two years ago, leaving lower courts confused as to how to interpret other laws protecting against gun violence. And in Garland v. Cargill, the Court blocked the regulation of bump stocks, which increase the deadliness of semi-automatic weapons as were used in the 2017 mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas.
Time and time again, this Court’s conservative majority does as much as possible to allow for corruption by the wealthy and powerful while doing little to protect the rest of us from it. They do so while accepting lavish gifts from the very people who benefit most from their decisions.
We cannot tolerate any delusion that this Court is objective or impartial. Anyone attempting to credit any of the 6-3 majority with being moderate is choosing to ignore the very real harm they’re enacting on the American people.
Enough is enough. We can’t wait around to see what this Court will do next in the wake of its massive power grabs. We know how willing they are to sacrifice democracy to fulfill their authoritarian agenda. We need real accountability in the form of court reforms advanced by Congress and signed by the president to rein this Court in — before it’s too late.
Keith Thirion is the interim co-president and vice president of strategy at Alliance for Justice. As a contributor to Democracy Docket, Thirion writes about the U.S. Supreme Court, judicial reform and the importance of state courts.