I am not a legal analyst like the inimitable and profound Stephen Vladeck. But the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is now a political institution and so, I do feel qualified to make a few observations. I assume that my readers are well-acquainted of and petrified by recent developments.
SCOTUS seems to be predominantly concerned with the restoration of checks and balances in America’s body politic.
Over the decades, Congress has created a fourth estate, an independent technocracy with both legislative and executive powers. SCOTUS aims to strip away this independence and place these agencies firmly under the thumb of the President of the United States (POTUS).
The problem is, of course, that doing so without also taking away the legislative and executive prowess of these hitherto autonomous players would render POTUS a dictator in all by name.
But wouldn’t it revitalize Congress by forcing it to legislate? The conservative majority in SCOTUS vociferously and disingenuously protest that this is exactly their agenda even as they are stripping Congress of its power of the purse and handing it over to a triumphant POTUS.
Congress has been dead in the water for decades now. The SCOTUS justices seem to have accepted this ineluctable and irreversible reality even as they pretend otherwise.
The conservative majority in SCOTUS all claim to be originalists and textualists. As their unconstitutional decision to grant POTUS immunity for all official acts and presumed immunity for unofficial ones demonstrates, this is only a fig leaf. Regardless of the merits of the decision (and it has merits, if POTUS is, indeed, the one-man or one-woman personification of the executive branch), it was not based on any original text or its interpretation.
Rather, narcissistically, SCOTUS see an opportunity here to team up with a “unitary executive” and share with him (or her) absolute power. To that aim, they are also crippling the rest of the judiciary in a variety of ways, making sure that SCOTUS is only game in Lawtown.
The alternative is to push back against illegal and unconstitutional power grabs by the Executive and be defied, thus exposing the irrelevance and impotence of SCOTUS, devoid as it is of either the power of the purse or the use of the sword.
Aren’t the conservative Justices concerned about the future of democracy in the USA? Of course they are! They want to make sure that Democrats will never again attain national power. They share the world view of the Republicans (and especially of the MAGA base) by regarding the Democratic party and the liberal-progressive agenda as detrimental to the future and the cohesion of the country, a clear and present danger, the Enemy that breached the communal gates.
So, by now, the vision and the agenda are clear:
A one-party polity (the one party being the Republicans) with a power sharing agreement between an autocratic POTUS and a self-indulgent, self-congratulatory SCOTUS.
If at any point in time Congress revives, it would be welcome to join the fray in a legislative capacity, having first ascertained that it would be forever controlled by the Republican Party and its values and beliefs.
This is very reminiscent of China or Russia with one tweak: an active, potent supreme court.
Of course, the Justices are deluding themselves. Sooner or later an imperial POTUS would shunt them aside and render them obsolete, perhaps by tampering with the court or by packing it with loyalists (see Erdogan and Orban).
The USA is inexorably headed to a dictatorship which would last decades if not longer and SCOTUS have made and are still making it happen.
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