Supreme Court

By Justin Crowe, an assistant professor of political science at Williams College

Gee, for a one-time constitutional law professor, Barack Obama sure does seem to harbor a lot of hostility for judges. (And, judging [a legal pun — ha!] by Samuel Alito and Jerry Smith, they for him.) Doesn’t he? First there was the broadside at his 2011 State of the Union criticizing the Court's decision in Citizens United, prompting Alito's now-infamous “not true” moment. Next there was his claim that the Court wouldn't dare strike down the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional, prompting Smith’s surely soon-to-be-infamous order to a DOJ lawyer for a memo outlining the Justice Department’s views on judicial review. For all his claims about “due deference to the separation of powers” and supposed belief in the importance of an independent judiciary to protect the rights of citizens and the rule of law, it appears Obama only likes the Court — only likes the judiciary more broadly — when it agrees with him. And surely that sort of “anti-judgeite” perspective is a terrible one for American constitutionalism and American democracy. Right?

Well, yes — sort of ... and no, not at all. In a sense, Obama only really values judicial power to the extent that its exercise comports with his policy preferences. But, at base, who doesn’t? Presidents always want — have always wanted — courts to bend to their will. And politicians generally always try — have always tried — to shape courts to serve their interests. So what? Does this really “politicize” the judiciary in some needless, inappropriate, and harmful way? Does it really demonstrate that judicial power — that judicial independence, that law itself — is somehow perpetually under political siege? Not even remotely.

As I attempt to show in my recent book, Building the Judiciary: Law, Courts, and the Politics of Institutional Development, any claims that judicial power — that judicial autonomy or judicial independence — has ever been, in any meaningful sense, beyond the sphere of politics are fundamentally incorrect.

by Jeremy Leaming

Slowly the economy continues to recover, with jobs being added over the past 26 months, but that progress is amazing in an atmosphere where one of the two major political parties is concerned only with advancing the outlandish interests of the nation’s super wealthy.

The Great Recession, underway before the Obama administration was in existence, has shoved millions into poverty and the gap between the nation’s top 1 percent and everyone else is the widest since the 1920s. Last fall, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people in poverty is at its highest in more than 50 years. As noted earlier this week the super wealthy are increasingly out-of-touch, indeed one retired multimillionaire is pushing a book that calls for more economic inequality.

But how did the country arrive at this point where the middle class is shrinking, the poor is growing and a tiny group of people are amassing most of the wealth? Because, according to some, the nation’s conservative party has been bought by the out-of-touch super wealthy.

The mainstream media, in the name of objectivity, will continue to blame both parties for gridlock in Washington, but a growing number of economists, academics, lawyers, activists, and others concerned about the well-being of all people are pushing back against that tired line.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, who have studied Congress for several decades, say the Republican Party is to blame for pushing fantastical policy and refusing to budge from it, therefore creating an atmosphere where progress or change is difficult to foster.

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics, Mann and Ornstein write for The Washington Post. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

One of the group’s to blame for the Republican Party’s unmovable concern about the nation’s super wealthy is Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which pushes conservative lawmakers to sign a pledge against raising any taxes. Norquist (pictured) is all about policy that starves the federal government of revenues, so policies to help the less fortunate dwindle, because those are not the people Norquist or the Republican Party are concerned with.

In his May 4 column for The New York Times, economist Paul Krugman notes the work of Mann and Ornstein, writing, “Specifically money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.”

“And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should doing impossible,” Krugman continued.

In a piece last year for Rolling Stone Tim Dickinson, said the party of Ronald Reagan has “undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.”