Member Newsletter
A TPM Reader wrote in this morning asking if it’s just grasping at straws to make a big push to put not just yesterday’s ruling but the Court itself at the center of the campaign. Is trying to change the subject in that way crazy? What I said was, not at all. Obviously, wanting to focus attention on something doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. And for those ready to pounce: No, this is irrespective of who is at the top of the Democratic ticket. The obvious fact is that any day Democrats are talking about Joe Biden’s age is a wasted, lost day. What’s more relevant is that this is not and would not be changing the subject. It is the subject. It’s the actual subject that the campaign and election are about.
Donald Trump threatens the entire existence of the American republic. He is able to do this because the Supreme Court he created is assisting him in doing so. It is a corrupt Court. It overturned a central right for half of our population. It routinely mixes and matches rationales, jurisprudences, logics to arrive at the end point of transforming America into the justices’ extremist vision. We’ve heard that yesterday’s decision was a terrible decision, an extremist decision, that it changes the American experiment fundamentally. No disagreement with any of those points. Most importantly, in my mind, it’s a fake decision. Yes, it will now be controlling within the federal courts. But it doesn’t change the constitution any more than a foreign army occupying New England would make Massachusetts no longer part of the United States. That may seem like a jarring analogy. But it’s the only kind that allows us to properly view and react to this Supreme Court.
The rationale for the decision yesterday has literally no basis whatsoever in the U.S. Constitution. To capture this, comparing it to the earlier, unanimous appellate court decision in the contrary direction is revealing. The argument amounts to: separation of powers, yada. That’s it.
The advantage we can all take from the Dobbs decision is that it takes issues and actions that can seem technical, esoteric, removed from daily life and plants it squarely in the center of daily life. The Supreme Court is hellbent on taking away our freedoms and our liberty? Yes, really. Dobbs, in addition to being a huge deal itself, anchors the larger assault in everyone’s daily lived reality. That’s the way to see this and argue it to the public: the same out-of-control Court, which Donald Trump created and which ended abortion rights, now wants to change the constitution itself to help Donald Trump commit more crimes.
The election is about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the two forces working to overthrow the American republic. That’s the subject. It’s not Joe Biden. So both substantively and politically it makes all the sense in the world. The Court has done us all the favor of not always being as aware as it might be of the political and electoral dimensions of the justices’ bad acts. Yesterday’s ruling is a helpful if disastrous reminder of what the election is really about.