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Conservatives used to complain that the Supreme Court was too powerful, but this year the court’s far-right majority continued to accrue power for themselves.
Like they did two years ago in overturning Roe v. Wade, the court this year overturned precedents willy-nilly, hurting Americans.
Ending a national abortion right has had an utterly predictable result (and was utterly predictable after Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were installed on the court by Donald Trump and Senate Republicans).
It’s not just that women in many states can no longer decide whether to continue their pregnancies, which harms their ability to get schooling and vocational training and to leave relationships with men who beat and threaten them and their children.
Now many states can take a callous attitude toward women’s health. Women have suffered.
Texas banned virtually all abortions. And so Amanda Zurawski, who “had been told that she had a condition that meant her baby would not survive. The Austin woman said she was forced to wait until she was diagnosed with a life-threatening case of sepsis before being provided an abortion.” While she survived, her body was damaged and she may not be able to have more children.
Trying to help women, President Biden Joe acted, saying these extreme, harmful limits violate a law requiring hospitals taking federal funds to provide emergency care that stabilizes a patient’s health.
Last week, the Supreme Court put off ruling on an Idaho law which contradicted that federal law, as Idaho would prevent a doctor from performing an abortion if, as explained by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the woman had grave conditions that would affect her whole life and maybe kill her — like “losing her uterus, going into organ failure, or avoiding any number of other serious health risks.” Unless death was imminent, physicians could not act.
Both conservative and liberal justices acknowledged their inaction could have involved politics. Samuel Alito, who opposes abortion rights, wrote “The Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.” And Jackson, who is pro-choice, asked if the Court was just punting the case so they’d decide it “just at a comparatively more convenient point in time.” Surely it would be more “convenient” for this besieged court to rule against women’s health after this fall’s election.
None of these cases involving harms to women would be happening if the court had restrained itself and respected Roe, a half century precedent.
And in a stunning move last week, the Supreme Court took immense power, allowing it to make it harder to care for the environment, protect consumers and workers, regulate financial institutions and produce safe food and drugs.
In a case funded by the far-right Koch network, the court overruled the long-standing Chevron precedent that said that courts should give deference to experts who write federal rules implementing laws.
Demonstrating that it makes no sense for experts to lose power to judges, when writing in another case last week, Gorsuch confused laughing gas (nitrous oxide) with nitrogen oxides, a pollutant.
Yet this decision puts literally tens of thousands of past decisions in question and threatens future laws aimed at controlling corporate power and protecting people’s health and livelihoods.
As Justice Elena Kagan explained, the majority of the court turned “itself into the country’s administrative czar,” giving “itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law.” And its justification for overturning such a consequential, long-standing precedent, wrote Kagan, “came down to a bald assertion of judicial authority.”
The Supreme Court also stopped the case about Trump’s January 6-related actions from moving forward before it released its presidential immunity decision, which outrageously placed presidential actions like Richard Nixon’s in the Watergate scandal -— using government agencies for one’s own political purposes -— outside the reach of the law. It’s a sharp break from when the court required Nixon to release the White House tapes.
Particular courts limit what they can do by relying on precedent. Not all precedents deserve respect, but still this is an important principle, as Sen. Susan Collins noted in explaining (what many warned her was) her unwarranted support for Brett Kavanaugh.
As Kagan wrote last week, the far-right court “disdains restraint and grasps for power.” And those are among the most important stakes of the 2024 presidential election.
