The Obama Diary

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that anti-abortion protestors enjoyed a special status not accorded to the normal run of protestor.

This week, before the conservative majority scurried out of town, it ruled that a) corporations are persons whose owners’ religious convictions must be accommodated, and b) home health workers in Illinois didn’t have to pay union dues if they weren’t directly members of those unions, even though the unions negotiated on their behalf.

Within a week’s span, the Court has done more to upend women’s and labor rights than any similar span in any other Court session for the past few decades.

But this was a predictable outcome of the 2000 election. Once George W. Bush was ensconced in the White House by a slightly less conservative but no less supine Court, the goal of the conservative movement has been to control the one unaccountable branch of the Federal government. Fortunately, with President Obama’s election and re-election, and with Senator Harry Reid’s filibuster reforms, the lower courts are now majority appointed by Democratic presidents. But the Supreme Court has veered so far to the Right—occasional favorable rulings notwithstanding—that it is almost a caricature of the warnings of a runaway Court those on the Left have bruited.

Continue reading ‘Apathy and its rewards’