If, during our glorious celebration of our nation’s semiquincentennial, your notion of American democracy is feeling particularly pinched, there is a specific, tangible reason for that. Blame the Supreme Court of the United States.
Over the past two generations, since the disastrous presidency of Richard Nixon, the court has grown increasingly, radically, conservative. Following the liberal Warren Court era, Mr. Nixon appointed four justices — including conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1969 — shifting the court’s balance to the right.
By 2018 — with the retirement of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, 2020’s passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the rushed, rapid-fire confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett ahead of Joe Biden’s electoral win — the court’s 6-3 conservative juggernaut was cemented. And with it the great demise of American democracy.
Proof you ask? Show me the money you demand? Let’s start with Citizens United v. FEC (2010) when the court sold the very soul of the electoral process to the highest bidder. With this decision, any sense of fairness, of a level field of play went out the window as the justices declared corporations and their limitless bottom lines were free to buy any candidate they wanted.
More glaring evidence of the court’s deliberate dismantling of democracy can be found in its gutting of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In barely 13 years, more than 100 years of suffrage was turned to ash. Three separate rulings, (Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) and Louisiana v. Callais (2026), made a mockery of that struggling undoing voting rights and enabling discriminatory gerrymandering.
The actions of this court, and this administration, make it imminently clear their desire to create a plutocracy that erodes equality, an imperial executive exemplified by a highly transactional, norm-defying “pardon economy” and an outright judicial power grab.
If, this summer, you notice the Statue of Liberty and all the presidential statues around the country earnestly scanning the horizon, it’s clear they are all looking in vain for the democracy they once held so dear.
