Post by addisona on Feb 13, 2022 13:40:43 GMT
It’s by now a wearily familiar ritual: The case against a foundational right or freedom—ballot access, uncorrupted elections, broadly affordable health care, reproductive rights—gains a hearing before the Oz-like conclave of U.S. Supreme Court justices. Gnat-straining procedural arguments—designed to distort or downplay the actual stakes of the constitutional challenge in question—overtake more considered and reasoned political deliberations, and presto: The substantive meaning of self-rule, equal protection, and full representation under the law once more narrows to a vanishing point.
Confronted with this steady erosion of the country’s politico-economic foundations, mainstream liberals and establishment Democrats mostly shrug in procedural befuddlement: Live by the high court, die by the high court. If they’re feeling particularly worked up, they’ll reel off a Twitter barb about Susan Sarandon, Jill Stein, or Bernie Sanders, to remind left-leaning activists and candidates that it’s their fault we can no longer have nice legal things.
But it’s the broader asymmetry here—which has an energetic, dogmatic conservative legal establishment continually seizing ground from an enervated liberal opposition—that’s the real sign of moral and imaginative decay in the America’s politics, in the courts and beyond them. Instead of ritually stigmatizing its extremist flank, the American right perennially finds new ways to empower its ardent apostles and advance its policy-cum-legal agenda; for all its plaints about the administrative state’s undemocratic excesses, it’s aggressively backloaded the judicial talent pool with hard-right nominees groomed by the Federalist Society. And meanwhile, instead of responding in kind with bold proposals to reimagine our core commitments to freedom, equality, and opportunity in an age of spiraling inequality, rampaging privatization, and depleted social goods, the proceduralist center conducts rearguard actions to preserve the appearance of comity, compromise, and bipartisan decorum.
To grasp the full sweep of this catastrophic turn of events, it’s necessary to reckon with some major shifts in the groundwork of our politics and their ongoing derangement of the separation of powers. How did the courts become the lead arbiters of constitutional observance? And how has this new mode of legal supremacy coincided with liberals’ disengagement from the socioeconomic issues that matter the most?
newrepublic.com/article/165336/constitution-meant-guard-oligarchy-book-review
Confronted with this steady erosion of the country’s politico-economic foundations, mainstream liberals and establishment Democrats mostly shrug in procedural befuddlement: Live by the high court, die by the high court. If they’re feeling particularly worked up, they’ll reel off a Twitter barb about Susan Sarandon, Jill Stein, or Bernie Sanders, to remind left-leaning activists and candidates that it’s their fault we can no longer have nice legal things.
But it’s the broader asymmetry here—which has an energetic, dogmatic conservative legal establishment continually seizing ground from an enervated liberal opposition—that’s the real sign of moral and imaginative decay in the America’s politics, in the courts and beyond them. Instead of ritually stigmatizing its extremist flank, the American right perennially finds new ways to empower its ardent apostles and advance its policy-cum-legal agenda; for all its plaints about the administrative state’s undemocratic excesses, it’s aggressively backloaded the judicial talent pool with hard-right nominees groomed by the Federalist Society. And meanwhile, instead of responding in kind with bold proposals to reimagine our core commitments to freedom, equality, and opportunity in an age of spiraling inequality, rampaging privatization, and depleted social goods, the proceduralist center conducts rearguard actions to preserve the appearance of comity, compromise, and bipartisan decorum.
To grasp the full sweep of this catastrophic turn of events, it’s necessary to reckon with some major shifts in the groundwork of our politics and their ongoing derangement of the separation of powers. How did the courts become the lead arbiters of constitutional observance? And how has this new mode of legal supremacy coincided with liberals’ disengagement from the socioeconomic issues that matter the most?
newrepublic.com/article/165336/constitution-meant-guard-oligarchy-book-review
