Supreme Court pushes right wing's agenda

The first full term of the Supreme Court presided over by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ended on June 28 with a flurry of right-wing rulings. They came after months of decisions that eroded civil liberties and increased the powers of the corporations and the state.

As a result, progressive movements of all kinds are discussing how to turn back this intensified right-wing offensive.

The Bush administration is now thoroughly discredited among the masses, and senators and representatives of all stripes who will be seeking reelection or have presidential ambitions must work hard to dissociate themselves from the last six years of war and repression. In this political climate, the third pillar of the government—the judiciary—has stepped in to deepen the attacks on oppressed peoples, the working class in general and sections of the middle class, too.

Every school child is taught that the U.S. government was designed to spread the power of the state among three branches: the executive, the legislative and the judicial. This political system of “checks and balances” is supposed to protect the people from any one branch becoming the vehicle for power-hungry tyrants.

What they don’t tell you, however, is that the extreme and growing concentration of wealth at one pole of society and poverty at the other, which is the natural outcome of a capitalist economic system where everything—even the water we drink—eventually becomes the private property of the rich, also determines how these branches of the government function.

Much has been written in recent years about the “imperial presidency” that has emerged in the U.S., where the president and his cohorts in the executive branch have again and again preempted the Congress and the Constitution by starting wars and other hostile interventions around the world.

But the decisions by the Supreme Court in this term show that it, too, is tied to the rich and powerful and is bending the law to further down press anyone who might challenge the established order. And what is that order? A class dictatorship by the mainly white, male owners of fabulous wealth that is mainly concentrated in ownership of the gigantic corporations and financial institutions that dominate economic life.

The court decision that will have the widest impact struck down programs in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle that have been allocating children to different schools in order to promote a racial balance. Similar programs exist in hundreds of school districts across the country.

The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had mandated the end of segregated schools in the South, finding that the old segregationist claim of “separate but equal” schools was a fraud. But racism in housing and jobs existed in the North, too, where there were no segregation laws. Even after the end of formal segregation, Black children all over the country continued to be concentrated in a few districts where the schools historically had been underfunded and neglected.

By the 1970s, with militant, mass struggles for civil rights and Black liberation at their height, programs to achieve a racial balance in all schools, North and South, were in place as a way of implementing the 1954 decision. Those programs have now been dealt a heavy blow.

A June 29 New York Times editorial about the recent Supreme Court decision, entitled “Resegregation Now,” points out that while the U.S. is more diverse than ever, schools were already becoming more segregated, even before this ruling. It points out that more than one in six Black children “now attend schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority” and predicts that “This resegregation is likely to get appreciably worse as a result of the court’s ruling.”

The issue here is not whether integration or separation is better for the African-American community. That is up to Black people to decide. Many parents and leaders in the community might prefer well-funded, modern schools closer to home where Black teachers and administrators could determine the curriculum. That should be their right.

But this decision will do nothing to promote such an outcome. On the contrary, it is a ruling by a right-wing court that will lessen the educational opportunities available to many Black children and increase the disparities that already exist.

On the same day as this ruling, the Supreme Court also overturned a part of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, nearly a century old, that had forbidden manufacturers and distributors from getting together to dictate a minimum resale price. These big capitalists are now freer to conspire together to keep retail prices high.

Continuing on its right-wing roll, the court ruled that school authorities in Alaska didn’t violate a student’s free speech rights when they suspended him for raising a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at a sporting event. While no one knows exactly what the irreverent sign was supposed to mean, the court interpreted it as promoting illegal drugs.

Many thousands of cases are taken to the Supreme Court each year. It chooses only a few to consider and rule on. That this court chose such a seemingly minor case in which to intervene against academic free speech shows once again that the mantra of conservatives about defending local authorities against the big, bad federal government, plus their pretended opposition to government interference in the lives of the citizenry, is nothing but posturing.

But wait—there’s more!

One week earlier, the court had dealt a blow to investors who want to sue companies and executives because of suspected fraud, making it more difficult for class-action lawsuits to go forward. After the Enron debacle, which wiped out a lot of people’s savings, investors got very nervous and began looking for ways to hold high-paid executives accountable.

That decision was the second in just one week “that was a defeat for shareholders and a victory for the defendant companies. On [June 18], the justices ruled that securities underwriters on Wall Street are generally immune from civil antitrust lawsuits.” (New York Times, June 22) The appointed-for-life justices ruled in favor of 10 leading investment banks accused of conspiring to fix the terms and prices for initial public offerings of stock.

In many cases, the shareholders involved are pension funds that have been set up in recent years because Social Security is not enough to live on and workers have been losing pension plans that are partially or wholly funded by employers.

These rulings against shareholders therefore affect many workers as well as middle class individuals while protecting the richest of the rich.

Other rulings by the court in recent months have set back gains made by women and by the millions, overwhelmingly working class and predominantly people of color, who are ensnared by this country’s vast prison system.

The court approved the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which limits women’s freedom to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

It also made it more difficult for prisoners to appeal their convictions—just at a time when DNA evidence has shown how many people are railroaded to jail on flimsy “evidence.”

One ruling said that a prisoner could not file an appeal late, even if the court had given his lawyer the wrong date as the deadline.

Another restricted the jurisdiction of the federal courts to rule on habeas corpus petitions from state prison inmates.

And yet another ruling made it easier for prosecutors in death penalty cases to remove potential jurors who might be doubtful about the use of the death penalty.

Workers who are cheated on their pay also felt the heavy hand of this pro-big-business court. It ruled that employees had only 180 days to file a discrimination case—even if they were not aware that they were being paid less than other workers until after the time had expired. Many workers are instructed by employers at the time they are hired not to discuss their pay rate with other employees, and become aware of discrimination only after time has passed.

vs. Democrats

In most of these decisions, the court was split 5-4. Four members of the court are considered diehard ideological conservatives: Chief Justice Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But they were joined in all the 5-4 decisions by Anthony M. Kennedy, considered a “moderate.”

The five justices who make up this majority were all appointed by Republican presidents.

But they couldn’t have been approved without support from Democrats in the Senate.

There was not one dissenting vote when Scalia was confirmed in 1986, or Kennedy in 1988. In 1991, Thomas was confirmed in a 52-48 vote when 11 Democrats, most of them former Dixiecrats, joined the Republican majority in backing the first Black conservative on the court. All the Republicans and half the Democrats voted for Roberts in 2006. The vote for Alito later last year was again close: 52-48, with four Democrats providing the crucial swing votes.

However, the right-wing character of this majority on the court cannot be attributed just to differences between the Republican and Democratic parties, which are both political arms of U.S. big business, funded by and beholden to the capitalist ruling class, despite who votes for them in the elections.

The liberal court headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which ruled against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education and other cases, was also full of Republican appointees. Warren himself, when a Republican governor of California in the 1940s, had approved the establishment of the notorious detention camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Later, it was again a mostly Republican court that in 1973 approved Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling on women’s right to abortion.

What made these Republican-majority courts different from the one that exists today?

They made their decisions based on the ruling class’s fear of the militant mass movements in that earlier period. For several decades, beginning with the 1950s, millions of people took to the streets in much more than symbolic demonstrations.

The civil rights movement, in which African-American people and some white allies braved police dogs, fire hoses, the Ku Klux Klan and racist police in order to tear down the system of legalized racial discrimination, inspired a whole generation with the courage to fight for justice.

At the same time, all over the world people who had been oppressed and exploited by the rich capitalist colonial powers—including the U.S. as well as Western Europe and Japan—were up in arms, dedicating their lives in revolutionary wars to win their freedom.

The new militancy spread in the 1960s in the U.S. as youth fought the draft, soldiers rebelled against their commanders, and veterans returned from Vietnam decided they’d rather fight the system here than see young people become cannon fodder for the generals.

Soon the women’s movement was shaking up the age-old patriarchy. And, with the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, gay and trans people leaped out of the closet to confront bigotry and police brutality with days of street fighting in New York’s Greenwich Village.

All of this dismayed the ruling class, which amasses so much of society’s wealth during “peaceful” times when day-in, day-out exploitation goes on undisturbed.

They had to make concessions. And their hand-picked representatives on the court knew it. So they clenched their jaws and made decisions that would have been unthinkable in calmer times.

Today, a right-wing court seems to have the power of a juggernaut rolling over the rights of the masses of people. They’re appointed for life and needn’t fear a mere change in elected representatives. But let them feel the hot breath of popular, militant resistance and all that could change.