This Is What Happens When You Steal a Supreme Court Nomination
In a pair of decisions today, the Supreme Court upheld both President Trump’s travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and the rights of crisis pregnancy centers. It was a one-two punch that amounted to victories for the Trump administration and social conservatives, and losses for women and immigrants. Funny how it always seems to work out that way.
The court’s conservative majority broke from three previous lower court rulings to find that the travel ban is indeed constitutional, that the president possesses the authority to ban travel from certain countries, and that his executive order last year to this effect was not a categorical Muslim ban—despite Trump’s overt campaign promise of a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
In Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, the high court ruled that antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers (which are both pro-life and pro-lie, often trafficking in false advertising and misinformation) should not be required to provide women with medical information about their alternate option to terminate their pregnancies, as was California law. “Freedom of speech secures freedom of thought and belief,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said. “This law imperils those liberties.” Never mind, as has been widely pointed out, that the same freedom does not apply to some abortion providers, as the Court previously upheld a 1992 Pennsylvania law mandating that abortion clinics share adoption information with patients.
Further, today’s decisions came on the heels of Monday’s 5-4 ruling upholding all but one of Texas’s gerrymandered congressional districts, despite evidence mounted to prove they’d been drawn with racial lines in mind, so as to dilute Latino votes.
For this week’s greatest hits, President Trump and social conservatives everywhere have someone very special to thank: Republican Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, who swiftly began trending on Twitter on Tuesday. Why? Because this—this quagmire of keeping women and racial and religious minorities down, at a time when the country is already adequately soul-crushed—is what happens when you steal a Supreme Court seat.
Amid a frankly bonkers national debate about “civility” from an administration detaining babies in oversize cages, today seems like a good day to pause and remember that, under the machinations of McConnell, the Republican party stole a Supreme Court nomination from President Barack Obama after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016. You’re not supposed to say steal—like racism, polite society seems to demand we tiptoe around this truth, instead issuing the disclaimer that Republicans, under McConnell, blocked Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, on the bogus grounds that Obama’s presidency was in its final months. But if we’re being honest, “tender age” children are babies, alternative facts are lies, and Mitch McConnell manipulated and stole a Supreme Court nomination from Barack Obama, paving the way for Trump to nominate Gorsuch . . . and leading us directly to this week’s trio of troubling decisions. How’s that for civility?
The travel ban, crisis pregnancy, and gerrymandering rulings all just so happened to be decided by a 5-4 majority, with Gorsuch predictably falling squarely on the side of what I guess we’re calling “conservatism” in each (though it isn’t “conservative,” not by any stretch)—the living representative of the reliable deciding vote McConnell dreamed up two years ago, living on the prayer that Hillary Clinton would lose and a Republican—any Republican—would win. And Gorsuch has come through in the clutch: In the gerrymandering case, he notably aligned himself with Justice Clarence Thomas by asserting that the Voting Rights Act—meant to combat voter suppression—does not prevent racial gerrymandering, potentially paving the way for more diminishing of Hispanic votes, or, as has long been the case, those of African-Americans.
This week’s SCOTUS decisions make for quite the conflation of messages: In one case, Gorsuch and company boosted the pro-life cause—while at the same time cementing that the lives of women, Muslims, immigrants and underrepresented voters don’t necessarily apply. (Sure, “all lives matter—“ as long as white male lives matter most.) They found that the free speech rights of crisis pregnancy center operators are sacred; but the voting rights of Hispanics in Texas were negotiable. And above all, they proved that McConnell’s obstruction of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland “worked.” But who did it work for?
