For decades, many far-right Christian fundamentalists angrily complained that conservative GOP-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices were not conservative enough. Although Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor were Ronald Reagan appointees, they weren't considered ideologues and sometimes sided with liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when it came to abortion and gay rights.
But following Donald Trump's presidency, the High Court has a 6-3 GOP supermajority that many legal scholars have attacked as radical and anti-democracy.
In a scathing in-depth article published on the 4th of July 2024, The American Prospect's Ryan Cooper lays out a "non-exhaustive list of holes" that the Roberts Court has "blasted" into the U.S. Constitution.
"First Amendment protections for freedom of worship, speech, and the press are under an all-out assault from right-wing state legislatures," Cooper observes. "The 'Ten Commandments' — not the actual ones, incidentally — are being set up on government property across several states. Bigoted restraints on the speech rights of teachers and professors have swept the country."
Cooper continues, "Mississippi is persecuting reporters for uncovering flagrant welfare fraud on the part of the state Republican regime. The Court is doing nothing about any of this."
Cooper argues that the Founding Fathers would have had "slack-jawed horror" over the view that the Second Amendment allows one to have "as many fully automatic weapons" as they like.
"The Fourth Amendment's protection of unreasonable searches and seizures has been steadily eroded by the Court," Cooper laments. "Any savvy law enforcement officer can easily search your property or read your private communications. The Fifth Amendment's requirement that no one be deprived of 'life, liberty, or property' without due process of law does not apply to growing categories of citizens…. The right guaranteed in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to fair jury trials for accused criminals is a dead letter."
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Cooper continues, "More than 95 percent of criminal cases end in a plea bargain. The Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment is a dead letter too, especially if you happen to be homeless."
According to Cooper, the 15th Amendment's "prohibition against disenfranchising people based on race is gone."
Cooper writes, "Not only will the Court happily allow GOP states to gerrymander their Black citizens into permanent electoral irrelevance…. the Court also prohibits Congress from doing anything about it."
The journalist slams the High Court's 6-3 immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States as "the worst Supreme Court decision since Plessy v. Ferguson or perhaps even Dred Scott v. Stanford."
"The intention, obviously, is to pave the way for a Trump dictatorship, like some Enabling Act passed before Hitler actually took power," Cooper warns. "But it's in keeping with the thrust of Roberts' jurisprudence since the moment he was confirmed."
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