Conservatives are on a roll in their quest to remake America through the courts

() — America’s conservatives, despite their limited federal elected power, racked up another important victory in the great political battle of the early 21st century.

The Supreme Court’s removal of affirmative action from college admissions Thursday toppled another pillar of America’s liberal social infrastructure. The Democrats have had their successes in the last 20 years, including earlier this month with decisions that mandated a return to draw the map of alabama congress and they rejected a Trump-endorsed theory of election law, but it often seems that conservatives have the force.

Republicans control only one house of Congress, and just barely, while Democrats control the White House and the Senate. And yet Thursday’s ruling further undermined a central tenet of Democratic politics that has united party chairmen since Franklin Roosevelt: that government must use its power to alleviate social injustices and help the disadvantaged. Civil rights advocates saw the decision as a new construction of barriers based on race that their ancestors fought for decades to remove, and as a step back in tortured history.

Originalist conservatives, however, who argue that the text of the Constitution fails to take into account prevailing social or racial realities, say the justices struck a blow at the fundamental fundamental principle that all are created equal.

The decision that universities can no longer take into account race as a specific basis for admissions, programs that advocates say helped raise the number of underrepresented Black and Latino students in higher education, shocked the entire country. .

It was a generational decision comparable to another precedent-breaking move a year ago, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down the constitutional right to an abortion by throwing out Roe v. Wade, who shaped society half a century ago.

Both rulings and a host of other right-wing rulings by the Court’s bold new majority, often on religious liberty cases favored by conservative Christians, are the product of decades of activism by the conservative judicial movement. Unlike the liberals, right-wing legal activists prioritized the ideological reconfiguration of the Supreme Court as a litmus test in federal elections at all levels and rushed cases on key issues through the courts to exploit the new composition of the highest court. .

Now the very nature of America is being remade with radical doses of conservative doctrine airing on summer mornings each year.

A broader political battle in the courts

The Court’s activism is being complemented by increasingly radical conservative legislatures in many states. Those bodies are reshaping laws in other areas (firearms regulations, for example), often with the support of judicial nominees for Republican presidents.

Any future Republican president who also has a Republican Congress is likely to try to take advantage of the Court’s swing to the right to pass laws on abortion and other issues that would further change the nature of American life. A Republican presidential candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is leading an assault on transgender rights and sexuality education in schools that he has vowed to replicate across the country if he wins the White House.

Republicans, as seen in the reaction to Thursday’s decision, argue that the Court is simply dismantling what they see as an aberrational set of laws and case law that itself contradicts everything they believe America stands for. They are adopting, for example, the concurrence of Justice Clarence Thomas in the majority opinion in the affirmative action decision that argued that “racism simply cannot be undone by a different or more racism” to benefit minorities, since it would contradict the constitutional principle that all are born equal before the law.

“Today’s decision, in combination with Dobbs, serves as a triumphant return to restoring our tattered Constitution,” Conservative Political Action Coalition Chairman Matt Schlapp said in a statement.

Critics of the decision argue that Thomas’ position perversely ignores the reality of a nation where racial discrimination and inequality of opportunity still run deep.

An earlier tipping point that triggered a backlash

The affirmative action decisions and Dobbs recall another time in early summer, in 2015, when it seemed the country was heading in the opposite direction. The Supreme Court ruled in June that same-sex couples could get married in all 50 states and confirmed the Affordable Care Act.

At the time, it seemed as if political and social conventions were being swept away in a validation of the change of base that then-President Barack Obama had championed.

“Sometimes there are days like this, when that slow and steady effort is rewarded with justice that comes like lightning,” Obama said, referring to the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Eight years later, the rays are flying in a more reactionary direction. And President Joe Biden’s view of the conservative majority in the dock could hardly be darker.

“This is not a normal Court,” Biden said.

The comparison between two emblematic moments for the liberal and conservative movements helps to explain an important theme of modern American politics: the clash between a more diverse, socially liberal and sometimes more secular society embodied by Obama/Bidenism and the backlash provoked by former President Donald Trump and conservatives, who believe that such social progress poses an existential threat to their beliefs.

He plays on the idea that the country is increasingly divided between Democratic and Republican strongholds. The divide lives on a national map, but it is also especially pronounced within ideologically separated states between liberal urban areas and conservative rural regions. Recent clashes over race and gun policy between liberal legislators and conservative majorities in state legislatures like Tennessee’s, for example, have exemplified this division.

Both sides of the political aisle raise the fear that the United States is in danger of being destroyed. But it is especially pronounced among the Republican base.

In recent years, the party’s blind loyalty to Trump’s radicalism, especially his electoral lies, has caused it to challenge even the fabric of democracy. A sense of national crisis and impending political extinction, for example, ran through Trump’s rhetoric after the 2020 election, prompting some of his supporters to use violence as a way to settle their political grievances on September 6. January 2021.

Liberal fury against the Supreme Court

Conservative Supreme Court decisions in the past two years have been especially difficult for liberals to accept because they believe the current majority is ill-gotten.

The dominance of the right on the Court was due in large part to the fact that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even grant a confirmation hearing to Obama’s last pick for the top bench, Merrick Garland. , who now serves as attorney general in the Biden administration. This allowed Trump to name Justice Neil Gorsuch as his first Supreme Court nominee in 2017. But McConnell then turned his back on his own questionable principle that Supreme Court nominees should not rise in an election year by accelerating the confirmation of Trump’s final pick, Amy Coney Barrett, in 2020, which enshrined the current 6-3 Conservative majority.

The move not only confirmed Trump’s status as a consistent president whose influence will be felt decades after he left office. It cemented McConnell among the ranks of the top GOP figures in decades and ensured that conservative policies endure even under Democratic presidencies and congressional majorities.

Recent revelations about questionable ethical practices by some of the conservative justices have further fueled anger over the Court’s legitimacy among liberals.

But not all of the Court’s recent decisions have angered the White House and Democrats. Earlier this week, for example, liberals were enormously relieved when the court rejected a long-dormant legal theory that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing election rules set by the state legislatures when it comes to federal elections. The call Independent State Legislature Theorya Trump campaign darling, had raised fears that Republican state legislatures in some states could simply decide how to allocate electoral votes regardless of the results.

Still, the Court’s long track record, on issues including gun control, race, business, regulation, climate, and many other issues, is firmly to the right.