Is the Trump Court about to Destroy Everything that has been accomplished since FDR & LBJ?
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision could be even more devasting than last week’s pro-gun and anti-woman rulings
Last week the Anti-United States1 Supreme Court created by the Federalist Society, the Koch Brothers, Phyllis Schlafly, Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and others ruled that states are not permitted to stop people from carrying guns but are permitted to force women to carry fetuses against their will.
The nation’s rapid descent into a horrible past in which straight white men’s authority was not to be questioned, concentrated wealth ruled, and the federal government had little power to regulate for the public good may be about to accelerate and plumb hardly imagined depths.
The decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which will be handed down in the next few days, concerns whether Congress has the power to delegate authority to federal agencies. That is what has been done, particularly since the New Deal began, but in some cases even earlier, to rein in detrimental actions by corporations and private interests and protect the public from harm.
As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out on Friday, a ruling against delegation of authority would mean that “government regulation could become virtually impossible. Having taken the federal government’s power to protect civil rights, it would then have taken its power to regulate business.”
At that point, the counterrevolution plotted for decades by those Kurt Andersen terms “Evil Geniuses” and detailed by Jane Mayer, Nancy McLean, Andersen, and others would be nearly complete. All that would be left would be to end democracy so that the people have no recourse to restore freedom, equality, and decency to a nation begun with such noble aspirations. They will complete that step if they gain control of either House of Congress in November. There is no way that a “Republican” (in truth, Anti-Republic) Party-controlled chamber would accept the vote of a majority, no matter how large, for a Democratic president in 2024.
The only way to preserve the United States of America is for massive numbers of people to vote Democratic this fall. No other issues will matter if democracy is lost.
We all must understand that exiting from democracy will be like the signs as one departs the security areas in airports: EXIT ONLY. NO RE-ENTRY. In the late days of June 2022, the extremists on the Court are making crystal clear what it is like on the other side of that one-way door.
{Historian Robert S. McElvaine’s latest book, The Times They Were a-Changin’ — 1964: The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, published on June 7, details what is at stake for America at this critical moment: preserving and expanding the progress made in 1964–65 or going back to before 1964, when the United States was, to a large extent, still “a white man’s country.”}
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1 Literally. The rabid right supermajority on the court seeks to go back to a time of “state sovereignty” before the Enslavers’ Rebellion (aka Civil War) when people spoke of America in the plural: these United States, rather than the United States, arguing that it is a confederation of states rather than a single nation. The concept of “states’ rights” and such absurdities as the Electoral College and equal representation for each state in the Senate, regardless of huge population differences, along with the Second Amendment (created because enslavers wanted armed militias of white men at the ready to put down rebellions by enslaved human beings and to capture those trying to escape bondage) were all about protecting the institution of slavery and, more generally, of property rights over human rights. “States’ rights” have almost invariably been states’ wrongs, promoting enslavement, racism, segregation, and the interests of the rich. The Court today clearly opposes the United States and wants to return to John C. Calhoun’s goal of states promoting the interests of large property owners without a federal government powerless to intervene on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.
Other Sources:
Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses — The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (New York: Random House, 2020).
Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 2016.
Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking, 2017.