"This Is About The Raw Exertion Of Power By Five Right-Wing Judges Who Have Absolute, Near Veto-Proof Authority Over The Rest Of The Country. Today, Millions Of Americans Had Their Right To Bodily Autonomy Stripped Because Of This Radical, Activist Court."

Chris Hayes, All In with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, June 24, 2022:

It is a brutal day for American democracy. For American women, specifically. For all Americans who can become pregnant. For all Americans, really.

A right enchrined in the Constitution, as intimate as any right one could imagine, has been discarded and destroyed by five unelected justices – three of whom were appointed, of course, by the last president, who got about three million fewer votes than his opponent.

In American democracy, it is truly rare to see rights taken away in this fashion. The proverbial moral arc of the universe that bends towards justice, the striving for a more perfect union, the progress of time – to watch these things borne backwards towards a reactionary past as starkly as this, in one moment to the next, it makes you feel physically nauseous. 

Speaking only for myself, as a person who can't become pregnant, as a man, I have not even a tiny sliver of subjective insight into what it would feel like today, if I could. But if you feel a sense of deep mourning and keening rage today, as the court undoes fifty years of precedent by overturning Roe, you are not wrong to feel that way.

This kind of thing, the rolling back of fundamental rights, is not supposed to happen. But it is happening, right now. And it has happened in the past. I think today of a period in which it happened a lot, during Reconstruction, when reactionary forces weaponized racialized terrorism to undo the gains made after the Civil War to create a multi-racial democracy. I think about that period a lot ever since Trump's election, particularly, because it is the most salient example of many other ones, where the forces of reaction in this country had tried to claw back hard-won rights and often times, the strongest ally of those very same forces of reaction, the strongest ally they had was none other than the Supreme Court of the United States. Like with, for example, the Plessey v. Ferguson ruling, the disasterous 1896 ruling establishing the racist "separate but equal" doctrine.

In fact, taken as a whole, over the long arc of American history, there have probably been more instances in the history of the country, where the Supreme Court has sided with those forces of reaction and those looking to strip away fundamental rights than times when the Court, as an institution, fought  toward the enlargement of rights and democratic legitmacy.

It was none other than our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, who said, in his inaugural address, freshly elected to preside over a nation that was coming apart and in response to the Supreme Court's malignant Dred Scott decison, which determined that black people were not eligible for American citizenship, Lincoln said,

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon the vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers . . .

That's Lincoln. In other words, if the Court is going to settle all the matters as grave and fundamental as this, then we have given up being a free people who can determine our own lives. Again, particularly when the question at issue there was citizenship. Again, this was specifically in response to the court siding time and time again with the institution of slavery, acting as a backstop to the worst reactionary forces in the country's history. And while, to be clear, slavery and Reconstruction have no actual analog in American politics – they exist in their own plane – it is now clear on this day, if it wasn't clear before, that the Trump Supreme Court is squarely planting its flag in the historical tradition of marauding reaction that has so often characterized that body. 

Here it is, again, assisting the forces of backlash politics. Working to undo what progress society and social movements and democratic politics and other courts have made towards equal protection under the law and the dream of a multi-cultural, multi-racial democracy for all. And much of that dream has occurred, been made real, tangibly, only in the last five or six decades. It's very preciously, delicately young. 

Today, of course, the court annihilated half a century of settled precedent, simply because it had the votes to do so. The decison by far-right justice Sam Alito cited history in a manifestly cherry-picked way that is even inconsistent with the punative historical methodology on display yesterday in their gun case, when the same right-wing court loosened restrictions on who could carry a concealed firearm in public.

But of course none of this is about history or methodology or constitutional orginalism. This is about the raw exertion of power by five right-wing judges who have absolute, near veto-proof authority over the rest of the country. Today, millions of Americans had their right to bodily autonomy stripped because of this radical, activist court.

[News clips from Nevada, Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky]

Residents of South Dakota, Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky and Arkansas went to bed last night with the fundamental right to control their own bodies and access an abortion and they lost that right this morning. Tonight, they go to bed in a different world because five politicans (let's call them what they are) in robes decided it was so, because they had the votes to do so. And the same will be true for the millions more who live in other so-called trigger states that will automatically ban abortion in the coming days and weeks. To say nothing of states where Republican legislatures are looking to pass new laws to restrict access.

And make no mistake. This court, particularly the logic of the decision in Dobbs, is coming for more than just reproductive rights, whatever they say to the contrary. Civil rights for gay couples, protections for trans folks, contraceptive rights, voting rights – they are all under threat. And I think it is time – well, actually, past time – we see the Trump court for what it is: a genuine, acute threat to our fundamental rights, including the constitution of American democracy itself.

That said, the answer is not hopelessness and despair and nilhilism. Because it is also the case that throughout that same history, many of the court's most infamous decisions, the ones that live in infamy and heap scorn forever more upon the people that wrote them, ultimately have been undone by popular movements of opposition. It exists in a democratic society, still, it is an institution outside of direct democratic control but within a democratic society still. And the court losing its popular legitimacy has posed a true threat to its power in the past. Look at the protests on the streets happening in American cities right now across the country and the polling that shows public opinion against this decison. The court is about to face one of the largest threats to its perceived legitmacy ever in its history. Good.