The Supreme Court’s John Roberts‘ ‘corrupt bargain’ reveals what led to President Donald Trump‘s “abusive reign,” a new analysis found.
Roberts and the high court are in a “love triangle” with Republicans and billionaires, Mother Jones wrote Wednesday.
“Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts,” according to Mother Jones.
“His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation,” the outlet reports.
The conservative majority justices have paved the way for the president’s “lawless second term.”
“The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP,” Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler told the outlet.
And the justices appear to be on Trump’s side, allowing the courts to be used as a shadow docket while “the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law.”
It’s puzzled lower courts and added more questions to the high court’s decisions.
“As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast,” Mother Jones reports.
“It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” said Doerfler, who studies the judiciary’s role in democracy.
With a legal attack on the Voting Rights Act in the current term, the court will also consider “the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule.”
It’s now a matter of whether the Roberts court will push to secure a permanent GOP court.
“Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires,” Mother Jones reports. “His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not ‘lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.’ Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return.”
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