Latest SCOTUS term another huge win for MAGA

The right-wing justices doubled-down on their allegiance to the MAGA project by throwing our constitutional system into utter chaos.

The Supreme Court term ended last Friday, but the effects of their rulings this year will be felt for decades, largely by the most vulnerable members of our society. The right-wing justices in particular doubled-down on their allegiance to the MAGA project by issuing rulings that threw our immigration system into chaos, threw trans kids under the bus, and threw an even bigger crown on Donald Trump’s head. Here are the lowlights of this year’s Supreme Court Term:

U.S. v. Skrmetti

In a 6-3 ruling, the right-wing justices upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. This ruling will have devastating impacts on trans kids not just in Tennessee, but in the 25 other states that have passed similar bans as well – making it nearly impossible for hundreds of thousands of kids across the country to get the care they need and deserve.

This ruling is the culmination of a years-long attempt from the far-right and transphobic activists to whip up a moral panic about trans youth and their care. Despite the fear-mongering and lies about the trans community, the reality is just this: parents of trans kids want to be able to make healthcare decisions for their kids with their doctors and without interference from anti-science state legislators more interested in waging a culture war for personal gain than they are about kids’ safety.

This should worry us all. Anti-trans activists essentially created a controversy out of nothing, rejecting science and medical expertise along the way, pretending it had nothing to do with bigotry, and now their “sincere concerns” have been elevated by the Supreme Court of the United States to national relevance, equal in importance to the scientific consensus about gender-affirming care. And now, not only are trans kids at risk, but so is the bodily autonomy of any member of any community who finds themselves in the sights of the hard-right. Our freedoms are now up for “fierce debate,” subject to the “sincere concerns” of those who want to do us harm.

This is an excerpt from my full piece for the Big Picture. For more, check out the rest here.

Medina v. Planned Parenthood

In yet another 6-3 ruling, the MAGA justices determined that South Carolina can block Medicaid patients’ access to care from Planned Parenthood — including cancer screenings, annual visits, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, and birth control — and that affected patients cannot sue to preserve their right to care. The decisions held that individuals do not have the right to bring a lawsuit challenging South Carolina’s decision to end Planned Parenthood's participation in the state's Medicaid program — thereby cutting off low-income patients from the care they rely on.

Despite a lower court ruling three times on the same case with the same result — that Planned Parenthood and an individual patient could bring a lawsuit to protect access to Medicaid — the Roberts Court decided to open the door for states to further deny critical healthcare to marginalized communities across the country. Countless low-income people in South Carolina, and potentially other states in the future, will lose access to critical healthcare. Millions of Medicaid patients across the country rely on Planned Parenthood health centers for their primary and reproductive care, and people who face systemic racism and discrimination — Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, as well as LGBTQ+ people and women — are more likely to be covered by Medicaid.

This decision will also make it much harder for marginalized people to litigate individual rights in court. In her dissent, Justice Jackson compared the majority decision to key Reconstruction-era cases after the Civil War that stripped back individual rights and the Civil Rights Act of 1871. “A century and a half later, the project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws continues,” wrote Justice Jackson.

Trump v. CASA

At issue in Trump v. CASA was not (at least not yet) whether the president has the power to deny birthright citizenship via executive order, but whether or not the nationwide injunction blocking enforcement of the executive order was appropriate. The Supreme Court, again in a 6-3 ruling by the MAGA majority, determined it was not – that the nationwide injunction was an overreach of the authority granted to federal courts to provide legal relief.

This ruling has removed a critical tool in curbing the excesses of an out-of-control executive branch. Even worse, it grants Trump extraordinary powers to pursue his alarming policies even when the courts agree that the policy is unconstitutional.

In this case, the Trump administration didn’t even bother arguing the constitutionality of the executive order to the Supreme Court at all. Instead, they focused on the issue of injunctions and the supposed overreach of the lower courts, arguing that they should be able to enforce their executive order against anyone not currently a party to the case.

Here’s how Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissent:

The Government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this Court. Why? The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice. So the Government instead tries its hand at a different game. It asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone. Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.

In other words: chaos. The MAGA justices on the Court just told Donald Trump that he can engage in whatever unconstitutional actions he wants to while his policies are being challenged in court. It also means that children born here to undocumented parents are at risk of being targeted by an executive order that nearly everyone—except for Stephen Miller and a handful of racists—agrees is unconstitutional, unless they personally sue the Trump administration. This is not how constitutional guarantees are supposed to work. You shouldn’t need to hire a legal team to access them. This is not democracy.

This is an excerpt from my full piece for the Big Picture. For more, check out the rest here.

The theme of this term, and the vibe of the Roberts era of the Supreme Court overall continues to be: victory for the wealthy and powerful, and scraps for the rest of us. The MAGA majority mostly justifies these deeply unpopular rulings by deploying an “originalist” mode of legal interpretation, which requires considering what the framers had in mind when they originally drafted the Constitution 250 years ago. The reality is that “originalism” isn’t much more than a snake oil developed by conservative lawyers and judges in the 1980s who need a more euphemistic way to overturn civil rights laws besides relying on outright bigotry.

Supreme Court justices aren’t the only ones who get to decide what the Constitution means, nor should they be – originalism is far from the only way to interpret our laws. Instead, we should consider the principles of what legal scholar Larry Kramer calls “popular constitutionalism,” which advocates for giving all of us “active and ongoing control over the interpretation and enforcement of constitutional law.”

Here’s more on popular constitutionalism from Molly Coleman, the executive director of People’s Parity Project:

This isn’t an easy task under the best of circumstances, and it got significantly harder when Donald Trump retook power on January 20. It requires us to read and understand the Constitution and to make values-based judgements about what it requires, allows, and prohibits. Even harder, it then means we have to enforce our understanding of the Constitution by building the political power to act when we see the Constitution being violated and to ensure our meaning is the one that ultimately wins out.

In a democracy, this requires building popular support for our views, and there are no shortcuts. And even reaching majority support for our constitutional interpretation isn’t enough without action. Professor Kramer, in his book The People Themselves, describes how, since the early days of the United States, the people have enforced the Constitution against “errant rulers” in a number of ways, many of which apply directly to our current moment. Enforcing the Constitution against our current errant rulers looks like voting them out of office, petitioning (calling and writing your elected representatives) and assembling (protesting), defending the rights of people unjustly targeted by law enforcement, engaging in jury nullification (finding somebody not guilty if they broke a law but the law was unjust), participating in consumer boycotts, and more. As we confront arguably the most errant ruler in the history of the United States, it is our obligation as citizens of a democracy to use these tactics to organize our communities around a vision of what the Constitution means and how it should shape our lives.

The Supreme Court’s vision of the Constitution includes delivering a great deal of harm to immigrants, trans people, women, and other marginalized groups. Most of us disagree with that vision. And there is something we can do about it – we can fight for a more representative government that holds these powerful partisans in black robes accountable, not just because we disagree with their rulings, but because their rulings are actively harming our democracy.

To get or stay involved, check out our resources from UFD’s SCOTUS Nerve Center!

Meagan Hatcher-Mays is a lawyer and democracy expert who serves as a senior advisor for United For Democracy. She lives in Washington, DC.