The American
public has been alarmed and aroused by the US Supreme Court's growing
extremism. But voters need to recognize the Court's radical majority for what
it is: part of a carefully laid plan to turn the US into a repressive regime.
NEW YORK – The United States has
been a constantly evolving democracy ever since it was founded in 1776, but its
survival as a democracy is now gravely endangered. A set of loosely
interconnected developments at home and abroad is responsible for this crisis.
From abroad, the US is threatened
by repressive regimes led by Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia
who want to impose an autocratic form of government on the world.
But the threat to the US from the
domestic enemies of democracy is even greater. They include the current Supreme
Court, which is dominated by far-right extremists, and Donald Trump’s
Republican Party, which placed those extremists on the Court.1
What qualifies the majority of
the Court as extremists? It is not merely their decision to overturn Roe
v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that recognized a woman’s right to choose
whether to give birth. What qualifies them as extremists is the arguments they
used to justify their decision and the indications they gave of how far they
might be willing to go in carrying out those arguments.
Justice Samuel Alito, the author
of the majority opinion, based his ruling on the assertion that the Fourteenth
Amendment protects only those rights that were generally recognized in 1868,
when the amendment was ratified. But this argument endangers many other rights
that have been recognized since then, among them the right to contraception,
same-sex marriage, and LGBTQ rights.
Carried to its logical
conclusion, this line of reasoning could even allow states to ban inter-racial
marriage, as some did until 1967.
It is also clear that this Court intends to mount a frontal attack on the
executive branch. One of the most consequential rulings of the Court’s
just-completed term denied the Environmental Protection Agency the authority
to issue regulations needed to combat climate change.
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It doesn’t take long to find the
common denominator in the Court’s recent decisions: support causes promoted by
Trump’s Republican Party and weaken or outlaw causes favored by the Democratic
Party. Consider gun laws. The Court’s radical wing listens closely to the
pro-gun lobby. So, though a recent epidemic of mass shootings created such a
national outcry that even some Republicans supported a new federal gun law, the
Court compensated the National Rifle Association for the loss by striking down a longstanding New York law that placed
strict restrictions on carrying concealed handguns (New York State immediately
passed new gun laws, that are likely to end up before the Supreme Court).
The Supreme Court used to be
among the most highly respected institutions in the US. Through its recent
decisions, the extremist majority has driven its approval rating to a historic low, and disapproval of the
Court to new highs. The dissenting opinion in the case that overturned Roe flatly
stated that the majority decision “undermines the court’s legitimacy.”
Unfortunately, the minority is likely to remain in the minority for a long
time, because the extremists are younger and hold a 6-3 majority.
There is only one way to rein in
the Supreme Court: throw the Republican Party out of office in a landslide.
That would allow Congress to protect through legislation the rights that had
been entrusted to the protection of the Supreme Court. It is now clear that
doing so was a big mistake. Congress must act, starting with protecting a
woman’s right to choose. If the filibuster must be amended to achieve that, so
be it.
But when it comes to organizing a
landslide victory against the radicalized Republicans, opponents face almost
insuperable obstacles. Republicans have not only stacked the Supreme Court and
many lower courts with extremist judges. In states such as Florida, Georgia,
and Texas, they have enacted a raft of laws that make voting very difficult.
While these laws focus on
disenfranchising African Americans, other minorities, and young voters
generally, their ultimate goal is to help Republicans win elections. As a
Florida federal judge recently wrote in striking down one of these laws, they were enacted “with the
intent to restructure Florida’s election system in ways that favor the
Republican Party over the Democratic Party.”
These laws would be bad enough if
they only targeted who can vote. But Republicans are now going even further, by
attacking the vote-counting and election-certification process. From changing
the law to make subversion of the electoral system easier, to recruiting
believers in Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him to
oversee the process, we are watching Republicans attack our system of democracy
from every angle. And here, too, the radical Supreme Court has done its part,
gutting the federal Voting Rights Act and allowing naked partisan redistricting
to weaken minority voting power.1
Fortunately, I am not alone in
claiming that the survival of democracy in the US is gravely endangered. The
American public has been aroused by the decision overturning Roe.
But people need to recognize that decision for what it is: part of a carefully
laid plan to turn the US into a repressive regime, particularly targeting women
regardless of the devastating consequences.
We must do everything we can to
prevent that. This fight ought to include many people who voted for Trump in
the past. I am a supporter of the Democratic Party, but this is not a partisan
issue. It is about reestablishing a functioning two-party political system
which is at the core of American democracy.
GEORGE SOROS
Writing for PS since 1997
122 Commentaries
George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund
Management and the Open Society Foundations. A pioneer of the hedge-fund
industry, he is the author of many books, including The Alchemy of Finance, The New Paradigm
for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means,
and The Tragedy of the
European Union: Disintegration or Revival? His most recent
book is In Defense of Open Society (Public
Affairs, 2019).
