I’ve been getting lots of worried questions about all the judges Trump has appointed, mostly because of headlines like this one in The Guardian:
A little history will dispel much of the panic. (In a separate post, I’ll chart the way forward.)
Through most of U.S. history, courts have been right wing.
How far to the right? Let’s take a look.
- 19th century courts held that man could beat his wife (as long as the injuries weren’t serious)
- In 1895 SCOTUS ruled federal income tax unconstitutional. (We amended the Constitution to reverse that)
- In 1896 SCOTUS ruled segregation constitutional
- In 1923, SCOTUS ruled minimum wage unconstitutional
- In 1942 SCOTUS upheld the evacuation order putting Japanese Americans into internment camps.
- In the 1960s judges were confirmed who openly supported racial segregation.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
There have been only two truly liberal courts in all of U.S. history: The Marshall court (1801-1835) and the Warren court (1953-1969).
The Warren Court gave us Brown v. Board, the case that desegregated schools. Brown v. Board (1954) ended Jim Crow and ignited the modern civil rights movement, which in turn ignited the women’s movement, causing widespread panic among reactionaries.
Check out these numbers. Obama appointed 49 circuit judges 268 district court judges.
As of Nov. 2019, Trump appointed 44 circuit judges and 112 district court judges.
(I suspect, but haven’t done the research, that liberal judges are avoiding retirement now, if possible, so many of the replacements aren’t much changing the judiciary.)
We know how to deal with ultra-conservative courts and the damage they do, because we’ve been through this before.
We push forward.
Reactionaries push backwards.
It never ends.
Despair comes from a mistake in thinking. I know, because I made the mistake myself. The mistake goes like this: US history is an arc bending toward greater justice as more people come to be included in “we the people.”
The mistaken assumption is that the graph naturally slopes upward, like this, and that we’re on a conveyor belt leading us to a more diverse future.
The flawed thinking is this: Without having to do any work at all, the conveyor belt will continue moving us forward toward more inclusiveness.
In fact, the graph looks like this:
Reactionaries are doing their thing (as they’ve always done) trying to loop us backwards.
People born after the Civil Rights and women’s rights movement inherited a nation leaning— for the first time in our history— toward a true liberal democracy:
Sometimes people who inherit something believe they are entitled to it and they don’t actually have to work for it. We inherited an ever-expanding democracy, so it’s ours.
Nope. We have to keep working for it. Every day, every year, every generation, because the reactionaries will always be trying to push us backwards.
The whole ‘equality for all’ is actually fairly new. Just imagine being black in America in 1860. Or a woman. Or both.
Trump supporters have always been with us.
- They supported slavery
- They supported Jim Crow
- They believed the federal income tax unconstitutional
- They thought minimum wage was also unconstitutional (on the theory that people should be free to enter contracts without the government interfering).
OK, back to judges.
Lower court judges do not decide constitutional issues.
The problem is the Supreme Court.
The solution?
That, my dearies, I leave until my next thread, an update on how anti-hardball tactics can bring us to a more democratic future.
You and all the people who sent me questions in the past few days.
Remember, there is a lucrative industry built around causing you to panic. There’s also a fine line between making people aware of the problem and creating panic and despair.
[View Part II as a Twitter thread]
