The Republican Justices Just Declared Themselves The Uncontested Rulers Of America

If you thought the Citizens United ruling was bad, wait till you understand what Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo will do to America.

by Justin Rosario

When the Republican-controlled Supreme Court handed down its 2010 Citizens United ruling, not a lot of people understood what it meant at the time. Corporations could spend money on campaigns. Don’t they already do that? What’s the big deal?

14 years later, we all understand that Citizens United opened a floodgate of money into our political system. We understand how damaging that has been. We understand the level of corruption that has been unleashed. Even disengaged voters understand that something is wrong and that maybe we should have less money in politics.

I really need you to understand that Friday’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo by six unelected judges, three of them illegitimately appointed to the High Court, will make the damage done by Citizens United look quaint. It will not take 14 years for the devastation to start.

A power grab unlike anything in American history

Here’s a basic and inalterable fact about the United States: It’s a massive and complex country. Not exactly news, I’m sure. But the important bit here is that the US has a lot going on every second of every day. The US was a complicated country 100 years ago and it’s infinitely more complicated today.

With hundreds of industries, hundreds of thousands of new technologies, and hundreds of millions of people, Congress cannot possibly legislate and regulate everything required to keep this country running with anything resembling order. To deal with this reality, we have built an administrative infrastructure to figure out the best way to fulfill the broad laws passed by Congress.

This means when Congress passes a law mandating that toothpicks be safe, they do not sit there and debate the specifics of what that means. These laws are left with a certain amount of ambiguity on purpose. Even putting aside Republican obstruction, Congress does not have the time to legislate the minutiae of toothpicks. What is a safe length? What is too long and what is too short? What materials are safe and what materials aren’t? Can they be artificially colored? What dyes are safe to use? How pointy can they be? How strong? How likely to splinter? What chemicals can be used in the processing if any? What about the packaging? 

And that’s just for toothpicks. Toothpicks! Cars have upwards of 30,000 parts. Commercial jets have, and I do mean this literally, millions. A Boeing 747 has roughly six million parts. Six. Million. Each one of those parts has to be tested for safety and they have to work every single time or planes start falling out of the sky. When parts on cars malfunction, this is what happens:

Without mandated safety standards, the carnage would be incalculable. But who sets the standards? Congress? Do you think Tommy Tuberville (R-Incestville) knows the first thing about jet engines? What about Marjorie Taylor Greene? Ted Cruz?

And lest you think I’m just poking fun at Republicans here, this is not a partisan issue. Not this aspect of it, at any rate. I love me some Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but I don’t want either one of them legislating the specifics of my blood pressure medication. Neither one of them is a doctor and they don’t have the specialized knowledge necessary to make good decisions.

But, of course, Warren and AOC have no interest in doing that. They defer to subject experts and, once upon a time, so did Republicans. 

However, that was before the GOP declared war on the very idea of expertise and put their plot into motion to rule America by judicial fiat. If you’ve been following my writing for a while, you should be familiar with this plot. It was “Plan A” before Trump waddled down the escalator and showed the GOP that fascism was a viable path forward. That’s “Plan B.” But “Plan A” was always to use the courts to cement the Republican agenda into place for the next 50 years even as the Republican Party itself lost the ability to win elections. 

That is what Loper was about, giving the courts the power to dictate the vast majority of public policy. 

What this looks like in practice

You may ask yourself why they even bothered. Why would the Republicans on the Supreme Court go out of their way to give themselves this power if they could already effectively veto any regulation currently on the books and most others Congress could pass?

There are two reasons. Both of them insidious and malicious.

First: By stripping the power to regulate almost anything, the extremists on the Court have opened the door for corporations to run rampant. Before, agencies could step in and say “No.” Corporations could sue, of course, but lawsuits take years and cost millions.

Now? Corporations can do anything they want and know that the government will be powerless to stop them. Oh, the government can sue but that also takes time and a lot of resources. It will be impossible to sue every single scumbag dumping toxic waste into the water supply. And that’s the point. 

This is what Republicans mean when they talk about killing the administrative state. They want the country to be ungovernable. Then, when things spiral out of control, who to blame? Democrats, of course! Aided by their most reliable accomplices in the mainstream media, Republicans know this will be a very successful ploy. They’ve been doing it for decades. Break everything, obstruct every attempt to repair the damage, and sit back and allow the press to blame “Washington'' or “Congress” or “partisanship.” But not Republicans. Never Republicans.

Meanwhile, billionaires will rake in massive profits from pushing out unsafe products or cutting corners on safety. Will workers and consumers be hurt, maimed, or killed? Yes. But so what? Lawsuits are expensive and corporations have deep pockets. Individuals with mounting medical bills don’t have the resources.

Class action suits are helpful but for the last couple of decades, the Republicans on the Court have been steadily eroding the ability to bring a class action suit against corporations. Chances are you had no idea that’s been going on. The press barely talks about it. Like I said, “most reliable accomplices.”

So now corporations can do as they please, especially given how much industries have been consolidated under a handful of owners, and we will have little recourse. Almost like that was the plan all along. 

But that’s just the first part. The second is worse: Republican judges plan to literally legislate from the bench.

Just gumming up the gears of government was easy enough to do by overriding laws and striking down executive orders. That level of power wasn’t good enough, though. Just blocking legislation and regulations does not allow corporations to do things known to be harmful. For that, they need the very kind of activist judge the right once pretended to abhor.

We know this is coming because the extremists on the Court have told us that this is their plan. John Roberts spells it out in his opinion:

Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. 

Just to be clear, Roberts actually said, with a straight face, that the courts have the relevant expertise but agencies staffed with experts with decades of knowledge in highly technical and specific areas…do not. Because let’s not dance around the issue, Roberts is claiming the power of the courts to dictate the best course of action to comply with laws and regulations. 

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So once upon a time, when the law said, “toothpicks need to be safe,” a government agency would take the time to determine the minimum safety standards to fulfill that deliberately vague legal mandate. If the multinational toothpick consortium disagreed, the courts would defer to the government agency. This was called the Chevron Deference. But now, the courts get to set those standards because “agencies have no special competence.” But John Roberts does. Clarence Thomas does. Samuel Alito does. State and local judges do. But not the agency staffed with experts who study toothpick safety for a living.

And, hey, wouldn’t you know it? Elected officials can accept “gratuities” now from corporations and billionaires! So if judges rule that toothpicks can be made from asbestos and our multinational toothpick consortium saves millions selling toxic garbage to the public, they can give those judges a nice fat tip afterwards. 

There’s absolutely no chance this could affect how judges rule on cases. None whatsoever. Just ask Clarence Thomas if the millions he’s received in “gifts” had anything to do with the fact he did a complete 180 in Loper. He’ll agree that there’s no way he was bribed and how dare you even suggest such a thing?!

It would all be hilarious if it weren’t so insulting. Then again, this is going to get a lot of people killed so the choice is either cry or laugh to hide the pain.

What happens when the Supreme Court, because they have “special competence,” decides that a little lead in your baby food is safe?

What happens when their “special competence” determines that vaccines aren’t safe or should be delayed a few years in the middle of the next pandemic?

What happens when they decide that greenhouse gasses aren’t dangerous after all?

What happens when they make a dangerous ruling not on ideological grounds but because they quite literally do not know what the hell they’re talking about? Can’t happen? Oh, but it already has:

Judges and their staff cannot intelligently discuss greenhouses gasses because they have no formal training in climatology or atmospheric chemistry. They cannot intelligently discuss AI regulations because none of them have any experience with programming. They can’t regulate financial institutions because none of them are economists. Google University is a poor substitute for actual knowledge. 

But now they have the power to do all of that, answering to the highest bidder or just making mindless rulings based on whatever the latest Fox News talking point is. 

If you do not yet understand how much more dangerous our world just became, you will. The only way to stop the coming nightmare is to give Joe Biden another four years, the House, and the Senate and demand they expand the Court to undo this power grab. You may survive 14 years of this, but I promise you, a lot of people will not.

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