Our last chance to avoid 100 years of Republican domination
If we don’t expand the court, there’s little hope democracy will survive a century of right-wing rule.
“We have a Supreme Court that is controlled by a super majority, 6-3 right-wing super majority. The Court's been controlled for more than 50 consecutive years by the Republican Party at a time when the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.” - Jamison Foser
Hopefully, you’ve been bombarded by headlines describing MAGA’s Project 2025, revealing in plain sight the right’s detailed plans for establishing “Christian Nationalism” on “Day One” of a new Trump administration.
Historian Thomas Zimmer calls it the right's “declaration of war on multiracial pluralism.” And it includes detailed prescriptions, discerned from Trump’s failure to establish a dictatorship during his stint in the White House, for destroying everything the government tries to do well, from biomedical research to protecting consumers to not putting people in camps.
What I haven’t seen much in the coverage of this cookbook for tyranny is the institution that makes this kind of nightmare an actual real possibility, the very institution that should protect us from this kind of assault on our freedoms.
Of course, I speak of the Republican-dominated Supreme Court.
The public has begun to understand these nine demigods are only politicians in robes, and pretty unpopular politicians at that. But we still hear very little real conversation about what it will take to get them out of our lives so we can take our freedoms back.
Listen to my conversation with Jamison Foser, the writer behind Finding Gravity and a strategist who helped co-create Media Matters and now advises Take Back the Court. We discuss two institutions that have been so corrupted by right wing thought that you can only call them frauds. We go off on The New York Times for a while but the most important part of the conversation is about expanding the Supreme Court:
Jamison Foser: There is a huge disconnect between what the people have said they want their government to look like and the composition of the most powerful branch of government. And absent a reform that intentionally rebalances the Court, the Court will remain in Republican hands for 40 more years.
Jason Sattler: So longer than our lifetime.
Jamison Foser: It'll be a hundred consecutive years of Republican rule on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, actually several times, and with the Republican Party that we've seen, nobody should be particularly confident that come 2050, we're going to have enough of a democracy left for the Court to naturally reshape itself at that time.
We need to understand that if the 2024 elections aren’t about expanding the court, expanding the court will never happen. The Senate map is that bad. In fact, there’s a chance that a Democratic president may never get a chance to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court if the Senate is lost this year. And that means there’s almost no hope of you or your children ever having a government that reflects the majority of the voters.
Jamison’s argument could be clearer. He also makes the case for why the Supreme Court is a perfect foil for any Democratic candidate, why the “But then they’ll do it too!” rebuttal makes no sense, and he corrects the record on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s successful asskicking of a runaway Supreme Court.
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