How John Roberts reshaped the law -- and gutted the Voting Rights Act

[marmar]

How John Roberts reshaped the law — and gutted the Voting Rights Act
Forget his reputation as a straight-shooting "umpire." Chief Justice John Roberts is a dangerous radical

By David Daley
Contributing Writer
Published August 30, 2024 12:00PM (EDT)


(Salon) Chief Justice John Roberts famously promised to be a modest caller of balls and strikes during his confirmation hearings two decades ago. In their occasional public appearances, Supreme Court justices always insist that the high court doesn’t do politics or policy but simply interprets the Constitution.

....(snip)....

The latest peek around the velvet curtains comes from always-wired CNN Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic. Her latest scoops from the court’s just-completed term included the stunning inside story of the decision in Moyle v. United States, which preserved, at least temporarily, access to abortions in Idaho during emergency situations.

....(snip)....

It’s a compelling look at how the sausage is made within an institution that has long insisted it’s not making sausage at all, but is far above such things, a white-tablecloth, fine-dining establishment where such trimmings would never enter the kitchen. The reality, of course, is entirely different. The Supreme Court is hardly a court of law at all. It is best understood as a third political branch of government, but one that unlike the other two consists of just nine unelected people with lifetime appointments, no ethics code and zero accountability, who deliberate in private and explain little.

The justices would rather obscure this reality, which is why stories like these are so rare but so valuable. It’s reminiscent of an important Voting Rights Act case that preceded the infamous Shelby County ruling, setting up the end of the procedure known as "pre-clearance." In the 2009 Northwest Austin case, the court heard an audacious challenge to the VRA’s crucial enforcement mechanism that required states with the worst history of racial vote suppression to get any changes to election laws approved in advance by the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/08/30/how-john-roberts-reshaped-the-law--and-gutted-the-voting-rights-act/

[Irish_Dem]

1. The GOP is clearly done with democracy.

It no longer serves any purpose for a group which only wants power and money.

The country, the American people, public service are meaningless to the GOP.

[Lonestarblue]

2. I am reading a book that describes how autocrats use the legal system to overthrow democracy.

The book is How Democracies Die, and here’s an excerpt.

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.—”

Trump, the Republican Party, and organizations like the Heritage Foundations are all colluding to do as dictators like Mussolini and Hitler did—take control from the inside and then destroy the institutions that protect democracy. This Supreme Court is helping them.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Recommended Reading: Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Justice-Courts-Third-Reich/dp/067440419X

Written by a German lawyer, published in Germany four years ago, and now expertly translated into English...Hitler's Justice tells an ugly story of moral corruption and professional degradation...Müller's book can in any event help us to see that judges should not be eager enlisters in popular movements of the day, or allow themselves to become so immersed in a professional culture that they are oblivious to the human consequences of their decisions. (Richard A. Posner New Republic)

By presenting one horrific perversion of justice after the other, Müller effectively destroys one pious myth to be found in post-war legal literature--that judges never wavered from the positivistic tradition of German law and did no more than apply existing codes. (V. R. Berghahn New York Times Book Review)

Hitler's Justice was designed to accomplish two important goals: first, to bring before the German public evidence establishing the utter failure of the vast majority of the German legal profession during the Third Reich; and second, to expose the unwillingness of the German legal profession after 1945 to acknowledge and remedy its earlier failure. Müller deserves praise for setting himself these goals, as well as for accomplishing them...Today, Hitler's Justice speaks with particular power to those judges who struggle with the most acute clashes between their sense of justice and the law. (Markus Dirk Dubber Columbia Law Review)