Kavanaugh
hearings highlight corporate control of US Supreme Court
6 September 2018
The Senate
Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US
Supreme Court are a predictably stage-managed affair.
For the
Trump administration and the congressional Republicans, and the nominee
himself, the sole aim in the hearings is to avoid any self-inflicted wounds,
secure in the knowledge that the 51-49 Republican majority will suffice to push
through the nomination. The Democrats will not only do nothing to stall it, but
will supply some votes of their own to back the right-wing judge.
Hence
Kavanaugh’s presentation of himself as a sincere do-gooder, who feeds the
homeless at Catholic Charities and coaches girls’ basketball, not the
reactionary who has given 50 speeches to the ultra-right Federalist Society
during his 12 years as a federal judge, before which he played a key role in
the attempted political coup against Bill Clinton led by Kenneth Starr.
Senate
Democrats are seeking to make a show of opposition to the nomination to promote
illusions in the Democratic Party as the “resistance” to the Trump
administration and its ultra-right policies, while allowing a select group of
Democrats facing reelection bids in November in states carried by Trump in 2016
to vote for Kavanaugh.
Minority
Leader Charles Schumer has flatly rejected demands from civil rights, women’s
and gay groups that he engage in protracted delaying tactics to block the
nomination, let alone repeat the methods employed by his Republican
counterpart, Mitch McConnell, who blocked Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland
in 2016 so that Trump could fill the vacancy on the court with his ultra-right
nominee Neil Gorsuch.
In such
matters, the Republican Party is invariably the more determined, aggressive and
politically ruthless faction in capitalist politics because it is less hindered
by the necessity of making a pretense of defending democratic rights or the
interests of working people against the corporate elite.
This
political reality forms the background to the remarkable statement given
Tuesday during the opening hearing on Kavanaugh by Democratic Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Whitehouse engaged in an 18-minute exposure not
only of the Kavanaugh nomination, but of the Supreme Court majority that is led
by Chief Justice John Roberts and includes Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito,
Gorsuch and Anthony Kennedy, whose retirement has created the vacancy Kavanaugh
is to fill.
Whitehouse
labeled these justices the “Roberts
Five” and focused on 80 decisions since
Roberts
became chief justice in which the five justices
appointed by Republican
presidents voted as a
bloc against the minority of four justices
appointed by
Democratic presidents. In the 73 of
these cases in which the court ruling would
have a
significant impact on wealthy corporate interests,
Whitehouse explained,
the “Roberts Five” pushed
through a pro-corporate decision every time. The
score sheet was 73 to zero.
The
senator’s presentation was remarkable in that it dropped the usual pretense
that the Supreme Court is “above politics” and mocked the claims that the
five-member conservative majority represents “judicial restraint” or opposes
“legislating from the bench.”
“When the
Roberts Five saddles up, these so-called conservatives are anything but
judicially conservative,” he said. “They readily overturn precedent, toss out
statutes passed by wide bipartisan margins, and decide on broad constitutional
issues they need not reach.” Principles like “originalism” and deference to
precedent are tossed out the window whenever they are an obstacle to reaching
the desired pro-corporate result.
Among the court decisions he referenced
were Shelby County v.
Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights
Act; Citizens United,
which overturned limits on corporate
campaign contributions;
and Walmart v. Dukes and Epic
Systems, which bar consumers
and workers from filing class action suits if
they are injured or
fleeced by corporations, forcing them into rigged
arbitration
procedures.
Other 5-4
decisions protected corporations from being sued by workers over pay
discrimination, age discrimination, sexual harassment or retaliation for filing
charges of discrimination, and shielded US firms from liability for
international human rights violations.
The 5-4
decisions include a range of protections for corporate polluters, as well as
those on behalf of ultra-right opponents of abortion, gay rights and even
contraception. Other such rulings include the upholding of Trump’s ban on
Muslim travelers entering the United States and a decision insulating
investment bankers from fraud claims.
Whitehouse
traced the course of nominations like that of Kavanaugh. Corporate donors
finance the Federalist Society, which promotes and screens ultra-right jurists.
It gave candidate Trump a list he pledged to use for his judicial picks,
including for the Supreme Court.
“Then big
business and partisan groups fund the
Judicial Crisis Network, which runs dark
money
political campaigns to influence senators in
confirmation votes, as
they’ve done for Gorsuch
and now Kavanaugh. Who pays millions of dollars
for that,
and what their expectations are, is a deep
dark secret,” Whitehouse explained.
He noted
that the US Chamber of Commerce had
won nine of ten cases before the Supreme
Court
this year, since Gorsuch joined the court, and won
the votes of the
“Roberts Five” in three quarters of
the cases in which it has been involved
since 2006.
“The American public thinks the Supreme Court
treats corporations
more favorably than
individuals, compared to vice versa, by a 7-to-1
margin,”
he said.
This warning
that the court was becoming discredited in the eyes of the public clearly
struck a nerve. Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley sputtered angrily
that Whitehouse had “spent 18 minutes attacking the personal integrity of
justices of the Supreme Court. He said that five justices had been bought and
sold by private interests. He accused them of deciding cases to the benefit of
favored parties.”
Whitehouse
is not a political radical, but rather a scion of the New England aristocracy,
with a family pedigree that goes back to Plymouth Rock. He is the grandson of a
US diplomat, the great-grandson of a railroad baron and related by blood or
marriage to a “who’s who” of the American ruling elite. He is warning his
Republican colleagues in the ruling class that they risk going too far and
provoking a response from below.
His critique
is of course one-sided, since it focuses only on 5-4 decisions where the
partisan split in the court was a factor, not on the far more frequent 9-0 or
near-unanimous rulings when the entire court sides with corporations and the
wealthy.
Nevertheless,
it provides insight into the reality of the corporate-financial oligarchy’s
corrupt and antidemocratic control over all of the institutions of government
and both political parties. This numerically tiny oligarchy has decided to
shift the Supreme Court to the far right in order to facilitate mass repression
of growing working class opposition. The Democrats, no less than the
Republicans, are involved in an elaborate, stage-managed parliamentary farce to
implement its decision.
What is
revealed is the character not only of the
Supreme Court, but of the capitalist
state as a
whole, including Congress—where the average
member is now a
millionaire—and the
executive branch, where the billionaire
president has
installed a cabinet of billionaires,
ex-generals, ultra-right ideologues and
corporate shills.
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