What a conservative Supreme Court is doing with its power
From 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House of
Representatives, until the pandemic made inaction untenable, Congress
enacted hardly any major legislation outside of the tax law President
Trump signed in 2017. In the same period, the Supreme Court dismantled
much of America's campaign finance law, severely weakened the Voting
Rights Act, permitted states to opt-out of the Affordable Care Act's
Medicaid expansion, weakened laws protecting against age discrimination
and sexual and racial harassment, and held that every state must permit
same-sex couples to marry. This powerful unelected body, now controlled
by six very conservative Republicans, has and will become the locus of
policymaking in the United States.
Ian Millhiser, Vox's Supreme Court correspondent, tells the story of
what those six justices are doing with their power. The right to
abortion is over, and affirmative action will soon be unlawful. But
Millhiser shows that it is in the most arcane decisions that the Court
will fundamentally reshape America, transforming it into something far
less democratic, by attacking voting rights, dismantling and vetoing the
federal administrative state, ignoring the separation of church and
state, and putting corporations above the law. The Agenda exposes a
radically altered Supreme Court whose powers extend far beyond
transforming any individual right--its agenda is to shape the very
nature of America's government, redefining who gets to have legal
rights, who is beyond the reach of the law, and who chooses the people
who make our laws.
