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      Chief justice John Roberts urged to testify on ethics scandals for ‘good of democracy’

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      The US chief justice should testify before Congress about ethics scandals besetting his supreme court “for the good of democracy”, a leading Californian progressive said.The justices are “so cloistered, they’re so out of touch”, the congressman Ro Khanna told MSNBC on Sunday. “They don’t have a sense of what life is like, so my plea to him would be for the good of democracy come testify. What are you afraid of?”The Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee has requested that Roberts testify about reports regarding relations between justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch and rightwing donors or, in Gorsuch’s case, the chief of a prominent law firm involved in a property purchase.Thomas’s extensive gifts from the billionaire donor Harlan Crow have been exhaustively reported by ProPublica, which also reported an Alaska fishing trip Alito took with the billionaire Paul Singer.The justices failed to disclose such links. All deny wrongdoing. Singer, Crow and the law firm executive also deny wrongdoing and say they and the justices did not discuss politics or business before the court.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as other federal judges but in practice govern themselves.Questions have also been raised about the career of Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, who, according to the New York Times, “has made millions recruiting lawyers to prominent law firms, some of which have business before the court”.In April, turning down the invitation to testify before the Senate judiciary committee, John Roberts cited concerns about the separation of powers.Amid progressive anger over decisions on abortion, affirmative action, student debt relief and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, calls for reform to a court controlled 6-3 by conservatives after Donald Trump appointed three justices in four years have grown ever louder.Public trust in the court is at all-time lows.Speaking to the former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Khanna told MSNBC: “The court is moving us backwards and young people in particular are outraged that the court is taking away the relief of student loans. They’re moving to a time where colleges used to be just for the wealthy and largely white, so I do think this can energise young people, in particular working-class voters.”Calls for structural reform seem to have as little chance of success as calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached – calls perhaps likely to increase after the publication by the Times on Sunday of an investigation of the justice’s membership of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionised him and all that he had achieved”.Republicans control the House and trail Democrats by two seats in the Senate, all but ensuring a block on any such move. Furthermore, Joe Biden is against major reform, such as changing the size of the court or imposing term limits.Khanna said: “Voters know that the court is just out of touch with their lives, that the court is taking away their rights, taking away women’s rights to control their own body, taking away students’ relief in terms of the student loans. The president forgave the loans. The supreme court took that money away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[Voters] see these justices, they see all the ethical conflicts, and they’re saying, ‘Enough with it. Let’s have a clean slate and term limits.’“I’ve said everything should be on the table, but … it’s not an easy thing to do. Often people see that it is polarising or partisan. I guess term limits is an easier first step … and a judicial code of conduct of ethics.”The Senate judiciary chair, Dick Durbin, has promised a vote on ethics reform. Any measure would be highly unlikely to pass the Republican House.Khanna said: “Even Republicans in Congress, if we go out and have someone buy us lunch, the vast majority of us would have to disclose it and have all these ethics rules. I’m just flabbergasted that the supreme court doesn’t have any of those. The limits are so low for members of Congress, anybody who works in the federal government, and this is just a different set of rules.”Khanna did not support an attempt to force the chief justice to testify, via a subpoena, a move called for by another prominent House progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.“I would support hearings,” he said. “I think that the chief justice should testify.“Look, I’ve met the chief justice. I met him a couple of years ago and he said he cared about the legitimacy of the court. The legitimacy of democracy. Well, if he cares about the legitimacy of democracy, he should come testify.” More

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      ‘Democracy is at risk’: inside the fight for supreme court reform

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      The supreme court has concluded another term that upended Americans’ lives.Last week, the court’s conservative supermajority ruled against race-conscious decisions in college admissions, overturning decades of precedent supporting affirmative action. A day later, the six conservative justices both struck down Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan and sided with a Colorado-based business owner who wanted to refuse service to same-sex couples.As the conservative justices’ decisions attracted criticism, their behavior away from the bench also sparked alarm. Reports emerged that conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had accepted previously undisclosed gifts and trips from wealthy stakeholders whose business interests at times clashed with cases before the supreme court.The outcry unleashed over the justices’ ethics scandals, combined with the widespread disapproval of their opinions, has intensified calls to reform the supreme court. And although court reform efforts have previously been denounced as radical overreach, more Americans are warming to the idea in the face of a six-three conservative supermajority issuing decisions viewed as largely out of step with the country’s principles and priorities.“Democracy is at risk,” Congressman Hank Johnson, a Democrat in Georgia, said. “We must save this supreme court from itself, and that’s why it’s so important that we do court reform now.”Confidence in supreme court plummetsThe combination of contentious rulings and dubious ethical behavior has culminated in plummeting ratings in that other all-powerful court: the court of public opinion.Gallup has yet to release its latest poll in the wake of the slew of recent ethics scandals and aggressive decisions released in the final days of the 2022-23 term. But the historic trend of its surveys gives a clear picture. In 2001, under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 62% of Americans approved of the way the supreme court handled its job, according to Gallup; by last September that had fallen to just 40%.Such a profound dip in popularity has ushered in a proportionate rise in demands for reform, ranging from calls for ethical guardrails for the justices to proposals for a radical makeover of the court’s structure and size. One Economist/YouGov poll taken in April found that 69% of Americans support an ethics code for supreme court justices. Another AP-NORC poll taken last year showed 67% of Americans back term limits for the justices, and a Marquette Law school survey released last September found that 51% of Americans agree with calls to expand the court.Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates for reform, said that a growing perception that the conservative justices are acting more as politicians than as judges was driving the calls for change.“I’ve been beating this drum for almost 10 years, and it is definitely getting louder. The series of recent events have left no doubt today that the supreme court is a political body, and it is only rational to want the justices to have to follow the same ethical rules that politicians follow.”As things currently stand, the nine supreme court justices are the only judges in the country – including both state and federal – who are not bound by any formal ethics code. The justices remain essentially unbeholden to any higher power.In April, the current chief justice, John Roberts, refused to appear before the Senate judiciary committee to discuss the ProPublica revelations about Thomas’s luxury holidays courtesy of the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. Roberts insisted that he and his fellow justices “consult a wide variety of authorities to address specific ethical issues” – without addressing the main problem with that argument: that such consultations are entirely voluntary and self-policing.Ethics groups like Fix the Court have despaired of Roberts taking a lead on ethics reform, and are now pleading with Congress to force the issue. Roth said the current malaise was so profound it had gone beyond merely extending the existing code of ethics that, since 1973, has applied to all other federal judges.Now, he said, it had to be enforceable, with “a mechanism for reprimand when there are violations”. “There needs to be a more strict rubric telling justices what they can and cannot do when it comes to flying around on billionaires’ planes or staying in their luxury resorts,” he added.Requiring the justices to abide by clear ethical boundaries might clean up some of the grubbier optics but it would not get to the substantive problem that progressive critics have levelled at the court – its ultra-conservative rulings. “Right now we have nine kings, who can set policy for eternity – their rulings cannot be undone in constitutional cases by the president or Congress,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a law professor at Georgetown University.Like Roth, Fredrickson has observed a sea-change in attitudes towards reforming the nation’s most powerful court. “Five years ago, this was a discussion more for academics than for activists. I don’t think that’s true any more – we’ve had a series of decisions that have finally brought the American public to recognize that the court is out of control.”Fredrickson was one of a bipartisan group of 36 legal and other scholars who Joe Biden invited in April 2021 to form a presidential commission on supreme court reform. One of the key proposals that the commissioners analysed was the idea of expanding the court from its current nine members in order to rebalance the court in tune with the will of most Americans.The commission’s final report points out that Congress has made changes to the size of the court since as early as 1801. The current nine has been set since 1869, but there is no reason that Congress could not change that number through simple statute.Commissioners were divided on the subject of expansion. Some argued that adding seats was essential to make the court relevant again and prevent the erosion of democracy, while others feared it would undermine the supreme court’s independence and legitimacy.Fredrickson comes firmly down on the side of expansion. “The only realistic option for protecting our democracy is to expand the number of justices, which would allow the appointment of justices with a firmer grasp of the need to be properly deferential to the elected branches,” she said.Aligned to the question of how many justices sit on the court is the issue of their longevity in the position. The US constitution says that federal judges should hold their office “during good behavior” – a phrase that has been interpreted as meaning for their lifetimes.A new report from the Brennan Center spells out how life tenure has led to increasingly long terms, and with it an increasingly undemocratic court. For the first 180 years of US history, the average service for supreme court justices was 15 years; today that has risen to 26 years and the current crop could serve on average 35 years.With long terms has come a democratically skewed judicial panel. Since the presidency of George HW Bush, Republicans have won four out of nine presidential elections – only two prevailing in the popular vote – yet they have appointed six out of today’s nine justices.The Brennan Center recommends a new interpretation of “during good behavior”. Justices continue to serve for life, but after 18 years of actively judging cases they step back into a more supporting role – a “senior” status that has been applied to lower court judges for more than 100 years.Under Brennan’s formula, that would be coupled with regular appointments to the bench made every two years, so that each president would have two appointments per four-year term. That could instantly put an end to the ugly hyper-partisan infighting and obstructionism that saw the Republican Senate block Merrick Garland’s appointment by Barack Obama in 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut many progressive activists argue term limits alone will not provide an immediate remedy to their concerns. They accuse Republicans of having “stolen” the court by refusing to consider Garland’s nomination and then fast-tracking the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett days before Biden won the 2020 election. One academic study concluded that, barring congressional intervention, the supreme court may not see a liberal majority until 2065.“Even if you passed a term limits bill with a code of ethics, it wouldn’t do much to put a dent into what is right now a Republican supermajority,” said Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive group Demand Justice. “If you want to restore balance to the court, if you believe that the Republicans arrived at this six-three supermajority through illicit means, then court expansion becomes necessary to achieve balance anytime soon.”Political momentum builds for court reformAs Americans continue to reel from the court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v Wade, terminating federal protections for abortion access, the reproductive rights groups NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have both come out in favor of court expansion.“We’ve known for a long time that reproductive rights and freedom are completely intertwined with the supreme court,” Naral’s president, Mini Timmaraju, nsaid. “We’ve become really clear-eyed that it’s not responsible for us to be an organization that promotes and advocates for advancement of reproductive freedom without engaging seriously in discussions around the court.”Naral was one of dozens of groups to sign on to the “Just Majority” project, which held events across the country this spring to advocate for court reform. The campaign included a diverse array of leaders from across the progressive movement, including racial justice organizations such as Color of Change and gun safety groups like Newtown Action Alliance.“We have to start coming to terms with just how much of a democracy we still don’t have,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change. “We have an unelected, unaccountable, corrupt body of people that stand in the way of democracy, stand in the way of justice and stand in the way of the will of the people.”To advance their court reform efforts, groups like Demand Justice followed the playbook of activists who lobbied against the Senate filibuster. By convincing more progressive groups to sign on to the campaign, court reform advocates have been able to persuade more Democratic lawmakers as well.Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator of Wisconsin who served on the judiciary committee, counts himself among the converted. Feingold, now the president of the American Constitution Society, said he was uncomfortable with the idea of term limits or court expansion as recently as a couple of years ago.He said: “People who have been much more cautious about this in the past have come to the conclusion that, if you simply allow this kind of a situation to continue for the next 20 years or so, with justices who are very ideological, very political and also in some cases unethical, then you are allowing a whole generation or more to be locked away from having a legitimate impact on the law.”Some of Feingold’s former congressional colleagues have adopted the same mindset. In the House, Johnson has introduced a suite of bills aimed at overhauling the court through adopting a robust code of ethics, establishing term limits and adding four justices to the bench. One of Johnson’s progressive colleagues, congressman Ro Khanna of California, reintroduced his own term limit proposal last week in response to the dismantling of Biden’s student debt relief program.Asked about the possibility of expanding the court, Khanna told the Guardian: “I think everything has to be on the table, but I think the supreme court term limits is the most likely and where we should focus our energy.”But Johnson, like Fallon, takes an “all of the above” approach to reforming the court. “We need to do both,” Johnson said. “We need to unpack this court, and we need to expand this court because that will help us right now.”Even as more Democratic lawmakers have endorsed court reform, the leader of their party has remained notably quiet. During the 2020 campaign, Biden shied away from backing court expansion, and progressive activists viewed his formation of the commission to study reform proposals as a “punt”.Still, even a longtime institutionalist like Biden has had his faith in the court tested. After the conservative majority issued its decision ending affirmative action, Biden described the current court as “not normal”. He later told MSNBC that this court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history”.Fallon believes the president will be “the last domino to fall” in backing court reform. But Fallon predicted Biden’s endorsement of court reform will become “inevitable” in response to growing public outrage“You can’t hide your head in the sand,” Feingold said. “When the court’s been stolen, when it’s been politicized, when it has the worst ethics reputation it’s had in memory, then unusual measures have to be taken – not to recapture the court for the other side of the political agenda, but to restore the legitimacy of the court.” More

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      Key Democrat attacks US supreme court chief justice over ethics scandal

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      The chair of the Senate judiciary committee has launched a new attack on the chief justice of the US supreme court, promising a vote on ethics reform legislation after a term beset by scandal over relationships between rightwing justices and wealthy donors and featuring a string of controversial rulings.“The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards,” Democrat Dick Durbin said.In a Thursday statement, Durbin added: “‘God save the United States and this honourable court!’ These are the words spoken by the marshal when she gavels the supreme court into session. But many questions remain at the end of the court’s latest term regarding its reputation, credibility, and ‘honourable’ status.”“I’m sorry to see Chief Justice [John] Roberts end the term without taking action on the ethical issues plaguing the court – all while the court handed down decisions that dismantled longstanding precedents and the progress our country has made over generations.”Roberts has refused to testify in Congress regarding reports of alleged ethics breaches concerning justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.Thomas’s relationship with the conservative donor Harlan Crow, including gifts, luxury travel, real-estate purchases and school fee payments, has been reported by ProPublica.ProPublica also reported on Alito’s relationship with Paul Singer, a conservative billionaire.And Politico reported a property sale involving Gorsuch and the chief executive of a prominent law firm.All three justices failed to declare such gifts or transactions. All deny wrongdoing. The donors and the chief executive denied discussing politics with justices or seeking to influence business before the court.The scandals have fueled calls for reform or, particularly in the case of Thomas, more drastic measures that might also restore some form of ideological balance to a court that was tilted right, with a 6-3 conservative supermajority, under the presidency of Donald Trump.But Thomas’s removal, whether by resignation or impeachment, remains a political non-starter in Washington.Three momentous rulings late in the now-concluded term – those which Durbin said “dismantled longstanding precedents and … progress” – have helped turn up the political heat from Democrats and the left.Rightwing justices used their majority to strike down race-conscious affirmative action in higher education; rule that LGBTQ+ Americans could be discriminated against by some business owners on grounds of religious belief; and ruled Joe Biden’s student loan relief plan unconstitutional.Durbin said: “The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards.” He has pledged ethics reform legislation and said: “An announcement on the timing of this vote will be made early next week.”In May, Roberts turned down an invitation to testify to the committee regarding ethics reform and, although supreme court justices are notionally subject to the same ethics rules as other federal justices, in practice they govern themselves.The court’s public trust and approval ratings have reached historic lows.Durbin said on Thursday: “Since the chief justice has refused to act, the judiciary committee must.” More

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      How do Democrats fight back against the US supreme court? – podcast

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      As the dust settled on last week’s judgments from the conservative-led bench, progressives voiced their anger at what they see as a lack of determination from the Biden administration to counteract the supreme court and its most extreme decisions.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan about what progressives want Joe Biden to do now

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      US supreme court ‘creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism’, AOC says

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      The conservative supreme court is “creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism”, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions.Her comments came just days after the nation’s highest court released a batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings striking down affirmative action in colleges, LBGTQ+ rights and Joe Biden’s student loan relief program.“These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.“In fact, we have members of the court themselves, with justice Elena Kagan, saying that the court is beginning to assume the power of a legislature right now.“They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself. And that, I believe, is an expansion of power that we really must be focusing on, the danger of this court and the abuse of power.”Referring to ethics scandals that have involved two of the conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Ocasio-Cortez repeated previous calls for Congress to look at removing them, a proposal that would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.Senate Democrats and independents who caucus with them, meanwhile, hold only a slim majority.Alito is accused of not disclosing gifts from a rightwing billionaire who lobbied for the court to end Biden’s loan relief program. Thomas is also alleged to have taken undeclared gifts, among other alleged transgressions, prompting an ethics watchdog last month to urge him to resign.“We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines, where we see members of the supreme court potentially breaking the law,” she said.“There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.“And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”Ocasio-Cortez also called on Biden to expand the court to 13 justices, something the president has said he is unwilling to attempt.Her comments reflect a wave of Democratic outrage at the decisions, which came after Donald Trump’s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the supreme court.Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow progressive Ayanna Pressley, Democratic congresswoman for Massachusetts, was equally scathing on MSNBC’s Katie Phang show, calling the conservative majority “far-right extremists”.“They continue to overturn the will of the majority of the people and to make history for all the wrong reasons, legislating from the bench and being political from the bench,” she said.The panel’s most controversial ruling last year, written by Alito, reversed its 1973 decision on Roe v Wade and ended almost half a century of federal abortion protections in the US.As Biden put it after an address at the White House on Friday: “This is not a normal court.”A poll released Sunday by ABC’s This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”, a significant rise from January 2022 when only 38% felt that way.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe poll, however, did show that a majority, 52%, approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.Condemning the ruling that allowed a Colorado website designer to refuse business from a same-sex couple, transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, noted the court addressed a situation “that may have never happened in the first place”.“We’re seeing more of these cases, of these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and [are] designed to chip away at rights,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.“You look at the supreme court taking away a woman’s right to choose, Friday’s decision diminishing … same sex couples’ [quality of life], you look at a number of the decisions, they pose the question, ‘Did we just live to see the high-water mark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away?’“Because up until now, not uniformly, but overall, each generation was able to say they enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before.”In other interviews on Sunday, two prominent Republican presidential candidates said they supported the supreme court’s recent rulings, with one, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.“For decades the Democratic party cheered a supreme court that went outside the constitution and made extra-constitutional decisions, in my opinion, because the decisions went in a philosophical direction that they liked,” Christie said on State of the Union.“Now, when the court makes decisions they don’t like, all of a sudden the court is ‘not normal’. This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at, is the way they analyze the law.”Former vice-president Mike Pence, speaking on CBS, praised the website ruling. He said: “I’m a Bible believing Christian, I believe marriage is between one man and one woman, and I believe every American is entitled to live, to work, to worship, according to the dictates of their conscience.“The supreme court drew a clear line and said yes to religious liberty.” More

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      The US supreme court has dismantled our rights but we still believe in them. Now we must fight | Rebecca Solnit

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      The first thing to remember about the damage done by the US supreme court this June and the June before is that each majority decision overturns a right that we had won. We had won a measure of student debt relief thanks to the heroic efforts of debt activists since 2011. We had won reproductive rights protection 50 years ago with Roe v Wade, and we won wetlands protection with the Clean Water Act around the same time. We had implemented affirmative action, AKA a redress of centuries of institutionalized inequality, step by step, in many ways over the past 60-plus years. We had won rights for same-sex couples and queer people in a series of laws and decisions.What this means is that the right wing of the US supreme court is part of a gang of reactionaries engaging in backlash. It also means we can win these things back. It will not be easy, but difficult is not impossible. This does not mean that the decisions are not devastating, and that we should not feel the pain. The old saying “don’t mourn, organize” has always worked better for me as “mourn, but also organize”. Defeat is no reason to stop. Neither is victory a reason to stop when victory is partial or needs to be defended. You can celebrate victories, mourn defeats and keep going.Each of those victories was hard-won, often by people who began when the rights and protections they sought seemed inconceivable, then unlikely, then remote, and so goes the road of profound change almost every time. To win environmental protections, the public had to be awakened to the interconnectedness, the vulnerability and the value of a healthy natural world and our inseparability from it. To win marriage equality for same-sex couples and equal protection for queer people involved changing beliefs, which was achieved not just by campaigns but by countless LGBTQ+ people courageously making themselves visible and audible in their communities.To recognize the power of this change requires a historical memory. A memory of rivers catching fire and toxic products being dumped freely in the 1960s. Of laws and guidelines treating queer people as criminal or mentally ill or both in ways that terrorized them and made them largely invisible to the public eye. Of women dying of or damaged by illegal abortions or leading the bleak lives to which unwanted pregnancies consigned them. Of the way the Ivy League universities in particular were virtually all white and all male into the 1970s. Of how inequality was so normalized that first people had to see and believe that women and Bipoc people should have equal rights and access to and a role in the places of power that decide the fate of each of us, the nation and the world. All that changed – not enough, of course, but a lot.Memory is a superpower, because memory of how these situations changed is a memory of our victories and our power. Each of these victories happened both through the specifics of campaigns to change legislation but also through changing the public imagination. The supreme court can dismantle the legislation but they cannot touch the beliefs and values. We still believe in these rights. We still recognize the harm and the destruction they were meant to prevent. If you didn’t believe that equal access and rights were wrong yesterday or last year, you don’t have to believe it now. Not just because those rights were denied by six justices, at least four of whom are so utterly corrupt in how they got their seats or what they’ve done while seated that they should be forced to resign.Last year’s attack on reproductive rights has produced its own backlash, with many states working to protect those rights, many elections seemingly pivoting on voter outrage about the Republican party’s brutality toward and hatred of women, and Republicans scurrying away from their own achievement and its hideous impacts. If the Republican party deserves admiration for anything, it’s for their long view, understanding of strategy and tenacity.The building up of an illicit rightwing supreme court took many years, and took fundamentalist Christians holding their noses to vote for Donald Trump because they understood that meant getting the justices to overturn Roe v Wade. It meant building power from the ground up to take state legislatures to gerrymander electoral maps and sticking vicious clowns like Jim Jordan into bizarrely tailored districts. It meant chipping away at voting rights, achieved in part by the supreme court’s attack on the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and its 2010 Citizens United decision that let a filthy tsunami of corporate dark money into electoral politics, thereby overturning two of its own earlier decisions.While each of the issues under attack need their own campaigns, voting rights and free and fair elections are crucial to all of them. Don’t forget that the only reason we have such a conservative government, including the supreme court, is voter suppression. If we truly had equal access to the ballot, American voters would choose more progressive candidates and pass more progressive legislation. That’s why what the public wants, believes and values so often differs from what the politicians chosen by dark money and voter suppression give us.One of the striking features of recent years is the baldfaced Republican effort to prevent Black people in particular, but also young, poor and other non-white demographics from voting. Baldfaced because it acknowledges that they are unpopular and that they’ve given up the goal of being in power because they represent the majority. As they become more marginalized through their own extreme and unpopular views, they have to use more extreme means – now including trying to steal and overturn elections – to hold onto power.This is as true of climate action as anything else: a new Yale 360 poll shows that “57% of registered voters support a US president declaring global warming a national emergency if Congress does not take further action” and “74% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.” The problem isn’t the people. It’s the power, and history shows us that when we come together with ferocious commitment to a shared goal we can be more powerful than institutions and governments. The right would like us to feel defeated and powerless. We can feel devastated and still feel powerful or find our power. This is not a time to quit. It’s a time to fight.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses More

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      Kamala Harris: supreme court rulings portend ‘attack’ on ‘hard-fought freedoms’

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      The US supreme court rulings which struck down the White House’s student debt relief plan, affirmative action in college admission and a Colorado law that protected LGBTQ+ rights portend “a national movement to attack hard-won and hard-fought freedoms”, Vice-President Kamala Harris has said.In an interview with National Public Radio’s Michel Martin, Harris declared that “this is a serious moment” for people “who believe in the promise of our country [but] understand we have some work yet to do to fully achieve that promise”.“Fundamental issues are at stake,” Harris said, as she called on Americans to vote – including in the 2024 presidential race – for political candidates who would work to shield rights rather than rescind them.Harris’s remarks came after the supreme court’s conservative supermajority on Thursday ended race-conscious admissions at universities across the US, defying decades of legal precedent to the detriment of greater student diversity on the nation’s campuses. The court on Friday also ruled that both a Colorado law which compelled businesses and organizations to treat same-sex couples equally as well as Joe Biden’s landmark student debt forgiveness plan were both unconstitutional.The decision on the Colorado law came on the last day of Pride month, which annually celebrates LGBTQ+ achievements and commemorates the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, a key moment in the community’s civil rights movement.That decision and the two others all were handed down a year after the supreme court eliminated the federal abortion rights which had been established by the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling.Harris said she and other members of Joe Biden’s administration have a role in mounting a counteraction to the supreme court rulings, which she characterized as “moments of great consequence and … crises”.In the early stages of his 2024 re-election run, as some Republicans call for national abortion restrictions, the president has pledged to work to enshrine abortion rights, among other reproductive health care protections.Biden also outlined a new student debt relief plan within hours of the supreme court’s striking down his previous one.But Harris told Martin that voters can also help plot the way forward. Besides voting all the way down ballots during local, state and national elections, they can organize against the political forces which planted the seeds for this week’s volley of supreme court rulings, the vice-president said while appearing at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans on Thursday and Friday, according to Nola.com.The supreme court’s shift to the hard right became possible after the Donald Trump presidency succeeded in appointing the ultra-conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.Harris predicted the week’s supreme court decisions would “have generational impact” and described herself “deeply concerned about the implications of this … to the future of our country”, Nola.com added.In her remarks at the Essence Festival, one of the US’s top annual showcases for Black culture, Harris said: “I feel very strongly that the promise of America will only be achieved if we’re willing to fight for it.” More

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      Biden says supreme court ‘misinterpreted the constitution’ as he announces new student debt relief plan – live

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      From 2h agoJoe Biden said he will announce a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.“I’m announcing today a new path consistent with today’s ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow (education secretary Miguel Cardona) … to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances,” the president said.Speaking from the White House briefing room, secretary of education Miguel Cardona said he “strongly disagreed” with the supreme court’s decision and vowed to “open up an alternative path to debt relief for as many borrowers as possible, as quickly as possible”.In ruling against the Biden administration’s landmark student debt forgiveness plan, the court had “ruled against more than 40 million working families”, Cardona said.
      We’re not talking about the millionaires who benefited from the billions in tax giveaway a few years ago. We’re talking about low and middle income families recovering from the worst pandemic in a century.
      He said it was “outrageous” that Republican members of Congress had “fought so hard against the program that would have helped millions of their own constituents”.Cardona added:
      Today, I want to assure our students, our borrowers and families across America – our fight is not over.
      Vice-president Kamala Harris has spoken out against the supreme court’s ruling today striking down a Colorado civil rights law which compels businesses and organizations to treat same-sex couples equally.The court’s decision “departs from decades of jurisprudence by creating an exception to protections against discrimination in public accommodations”, a statement from Harris reads.
      On the last day of Pride Month, the Supreme Court has paved the way for businesses across our nation to discriminate in the name of “free expression”—against the LGBTQI+ community, racial and religious minorities, the disability community, and women.
      At a time when we celebrate hard-won advancements in LGBTQI+ rights, this decision threatens future progress.
      She added that she and President Joe Biden would “continue to rigorously enforce federal anti-discrimination protections and fight for the right of all people to participate equally in our society”.We have a clip from Joe Biden’s speech where he announced a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today said his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back.To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.Hardly anyone successfully makes it through the process. Between 1997 and 2022, an average of seven people successfully made it through the process each year, according to Blake Feldman, a criminal justice researcher in Mississippi.The supreme court did not say on Friday why it was rejecting the case (it takes four votes on the court to grant review) and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only two justices who noted their dissent from the denial. Jackson wrote an opinion saying the fifth circuit had committed “two egregious analytical errors that ought to be corrected”.First, she wrote, even though Mississippi voters removed a crime in 1950 and added two more in 1968, the substance of many of the original crimes from 1890 remained intact. That means that the list is still discriminatory, she wrote in a dissent that was joined by Sotomayor.“The “remaining crimes” from [the list of crimes] pernicious origin still work the very harm the 1890 Convention intended – denying Black Mississippians the vote,” she wrote.The US supreme court turned away a case on Friday challenging Mississippi’s rules around voting rights for people with felony convictions, leaving intact a policy implemented more than a century ago with the explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting.Those convicted of any one of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose the right to vote. The list is rooted in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, where delegates chose disenfranchising crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit.“We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” the president of the convention said at the time. The crimes, which include bribery, theft, carjacking, bigamy and timber larceny, have remained largely the same since then; Mississippi voters amended it remove burglary in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen percent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.Read the full story by my colleague Sam Levine here.In his speech at the White House, Joe Biden repeated his criticism of the Republicans who led the successful effort to block his plan to cancel some federal student loan debt.Biden called out those Republican members who received “hundreds of thousands for themselves” in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans that were later forgiven, but who had strongly opposed his student debt plan.
      The hypocrisy is stunning.
      The new student debt relief plan will be implemented under the federal government’s rulemaking process, the White House said, and it seems like it will take months to get the program up and running.The education department today issued a notice announcing the plan, will hold a virtual public hearing on 18 July and “finalize the issues to be addressed through rulemaking and begin the negotiated rulemaking sessions this fall. The Department will complete this rulemaking as quickly as possible,” according to the White House.In addition, the White House said the education department will institute “a 12-month ‘on-ramp’ to repayment, running from 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024, so that financially vulnerable borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent, reported to credit bureaus, placed in default, or referred to debt collection agencies.”Federal student loan payments have been paused since Covid-19 broke out in March 2020, and were set to restart this October. The Biden administration said the “on-ramp” is intended to provide relief to financially struggling borrowers who can’t afford to start making payments again right away.The Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong is taking the blog over now to keep you posted on this developing story.Joe Biden directed blame for the apparent demise of his student debt relief program both at the Republicans who sued over the plan, and at the supreme court justices who ruled against it.“I think the court misinterpreted the constitution,” Biden said. Asked whether he gave Americans “false hope” by promising $430bn in total debt relief only for it to be blocked in court, he replied, “I didn’t give any false hope. The question was whether or not I would do even more than was requested. What I did I felt was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done.”“But the Republican snatched away the hope that they were given,” Biden said.“This new path is legally sound,” Biden said in announcing his new attempt at student loan relief.“It’s going to take longer, but in my view it’s the best path that remains to providing for as many borrowers as possible. I’m directing my team to move as quickly as possible on law,” the president said.Joe Biden said he will announce a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.“I’m announcing today a new path consistent with today’s ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow (education secretary Miguel Cardona) … to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances,” the president said.Joe Biden has started his speech by criticizing the Republicans who successfully sued to block his student loan forgiveness program.“The money was literally about to go out the door, and then Republican elected officials and special interests stepped in. They said no, no, literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives,” the president said.“You know, these Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working-class, middle-class Americans. Republican state officials sued my administration, attempting to block relief, including to millions of their own constituents.” More