Conservative judges are rolling back rights with trickery

Americans have witnessed something remarkable unfolding in the judicial system in recent years: Conservative jurists seemingly bent on taking away—as opposed to preserving or expanding—rights from abortion to affirmative action enjoyed by the American public. Many of these rights are being methodically erased in lengthy, complex judicial opinions that the vast majority of citizens will never read. These rights are being whittled away in the shadows by judges whose names they do not know, and spun into unrecognizable forms by specious threads of reasoning that most do not understand. The results, however, can have real, often devastating consequences to their lives.

This transformation is deliberate. It’s the desired byproduct of a concerted, far-reaching strategy by the political right to achieve unfair and unpopular goals, spanning social, cultural, and economic sectors—goals that the right cannot achieve through the ballot box. Operating through the institutional mechanism of lifetime appointments which cannot be reversed, this political bastardization of the judiciary—most particularly at the federal level—by a virulent and reactionary “movement conservatism” is approaching its apotheosis. It now openly ignores its own precedents in favor of exalting paeans to “originalism”—and most recently, “history” and “tradition.” These amount to opportunistic exercises in cherry-picking, designed to achieve the results conservatives want, rather than what the law and modern society plainly demand. 

It is a strategy that subordinates and sacrifices the legitimacy and public confidence in the judiciary to the cynical fulfillment of parochial, political ends. Occasionally it reveals itself in embarrassing public demonstrations of judicial arrogance, as its practitioners flaunt their allegiance to it, explicitly dangling their biases in front of a public whom they believe have no means of recourse. 

It’s a strategy mostly created to serve the country’s ultra-rich, who have carefully planned for decades to achieve their goals of cementing into law a continuous spigot of multi-generational wealth. It also incorporates and allies itself, when necessary, with the theocratic fever dreams of the nation’s religious right, to whom it owes an electoral debt.   

But none of this is occurring for the good of the American public. Rather, it’s intended to serve the needs and desires of a tiny minority at the expense of the rest of the country. If ordinary Americans are going to do anything about it, it’s important for them first to understand exactly what is happening, and why every Supreme Court term now seems to bring a new set of reactionary edicts geared to upend and diminish Americans’ lives.

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