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Stephen Gottlieb: Why Neither Party Can Back Down On Garland

Why is blocking the Garland nomination to the Supreme Court so important to them that most Republicans won’t even meet with him let alone agree to holding a vote? Many probably think it is about gay rights and abortion. But there is much more at stake for both parties.

After the Civil War, a very different Republican Party was anxious to secure voting rights for African-Americans. They explicitly addressed the voting rights of the former slaves in both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and addressed it by implication in several clauses as well. Those Republicans, committed to freedom and equality, understood that if the states of the former Confederacy could exclude African-Americans from voting, the former secessionists could retake southern government. Even more important, southern control of the House of Representatives would be strengthened, because the former slaves would count as full and equal human beings in the census and therefore in the apportionment of seats in the House. If that greater southern representation could be controlled by the white secessionists without Black votes to contend with, the former secessionists would control Congress.

Republicans have now switched positions. They still want to control Congress by controlling who can vote, but now by excluding everyone except white voters and undercounting everyone except Republicans. The Court has given them the power to do that. First, the Court chose George Bush for President, stopping the count of the actual votes in Florida. It refused to subject gerrymandering to any legal standard, even though there is now a very precise formula defining the extent of gerrymandering. It has taken the lid off every measure that descendants of the former Confederacy can impose to prevent African-Americans from voting, opening the polls only when it is difficult for them to get there, moving polling places to make them harder to reach, and requiring documents for registrationthat are costly in both time and money to obtain. That’s the dictator’s game where the officials choose the voters instead of the voters choosing the officials. It shreds democracy. It seems it is all the Republicans have left. And if choosing their voters turns out to be insufficient, the Court has unleashed the flood of corporate treasuries on politics and undercut labor’s ability to survive as a counterweight.

Choosing their voters, and controlling political money to favor Republicans are their biggest motives for wanting to control the Court – it protects their seats and their control of states and Congress. But there are other motives. The Court has shredded the protections of ordinary citizens in product liability, fraud and breach of contract cases. It has shredded the responsibility of Republicans’ corporate friends in antitrust liability and responsibility for securities fraud. The Court has become the major enabler of corruption, a giant kickback to friends of Republicans.

If one adds Republican preference for the conservative justices’ attack on abortion and gay rights, and their defense of school segregation, the Court has defined virtually the entire Republican agenda, its social agenda, its attempt to subordinate democracy to their dominance, and its cozy relationship with corporate America. It gives the rest of us very strong reasons to stop them and to get the Court back in support of democratic government, especially the Court’s blessing for legally converting a vocal minority into national rulers.It’s time to stop them in the name of democracy.

Steve Gottlieb is Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School and author of Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics. He has served on the Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and in the US Peace Corps in Iran. This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, April 12, 2016.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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