The Tyranny Of The Minority
With the virtual certainty that Brett Kavanaugh will now be confirmed, an extreme minority has managed the complete takeover of our national government. As Michael Tomasky writes today, only one other justice of the Supreme Court has been nominated by a President who lost the popular vote and garnered only the votes of Senators that represented a minority of the country’s population in order to be confirmed. That justice is Neil Gorsuch, the man who stole Merrick Garland’s rightful seat, who managed to win 54 votes for confirmation that represented a paltry 42% of the population.
Brett Kavanaugh is now on track become only the second justice with that dubious distinction, with an even slimmer margin probably representing even less of the population. Those two will join two other justices who were confirmed by Senators representing a minority, 48% to be specific, of the American people, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Although Alito was nominated in 2006 after G.W. Bush’s victory in 2004, it could be argued that Alito was actually the first justice to accomplish the “Gorsuch double” as Bush was installed as President by the five conservative justices in 2000, a case so partisan the Court asked that it never be used as precedent.
If, God forbid, Justice Ginsburg can not stay on until 2020, then Trump will appoint another Federalist Society hack who will garner a similar level of support to that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. That would create a “majority-minority” Court where five conservative justices could not muster the votes of Senators representing the majority of the population.
The US Senate, the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body”, has become a sham, the haven of plutocrats. It refuses to hear evidence that might effect its decisions before making them. It was designed to be anti-democratic from it inception. Currently, Democratic Senators represent 40 million more Americans than the majority Republicans. The body is certainly no longer representative, if it ever really was. It is really time for the body to be sent to the ash heap of history. It is no better in the House of Representatives, where one estimate predicts that extreme gerrymandering may mean that Democrats could win the popular vote by an unheard of 8% and still remain the minority party. The Electoral College is no better, as the elections in 2000 and 2016 illustrate. And the chances of the loser of the popular vote often winning the Presidency in the near future is higher than I think most imagine.
Unfortunately, we are currently bound by the dysfunction of our Constitution. It permeates the thinking of the majority of the Court, undoing decades, if not a century, of jurisprudence. And its obsession with protecting against the tyranny of the majority has allowed for the emergence of the tyranny of the minority, who now have an almost impregnable grip on the levers of power. It is time for the next American Revolution.
