Finally, a plan to hold the Supreme Court accountable

And certain terrified Democrats, too

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

There’s some good stuff in tonight’s newsletter, so let’s get to it.

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🏛️ Georgia: Democratic former Rep. John Barrow decisively lost his bid to unseat sitting state Supreme Court Justice Andrew Pinson, 55-45%. Barrow positioned the election as a referendum on abortion rights.

🏜️ Editor needed: Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick is a big fan of the state’s judicial retention election system… so long as he doesn’t face any opposition himself. Bolick, a longtime pal of Clarence Thomas, voted to reinstate the state’s 1864 abortion ban and is very sour about the resultant campaign to deny him another term.

🙄 Get a grip: Let’s stay in Arizona, where the state House’s Ethics Commission just dismissed a complaint filed by conservative Democratic Rep. Lydia Hernandez, who accused four of her more liberal colleagues of bullying, harassing, and intimidating her over her political views. Hernandez had the same complaint dismissed last year.

🏥 Repeal this: Two health care organizations have filed a lawsuit seeking to repeal the mandatory 24-hour waiting period before undergoing an abortion. The suit also seeks to end mandated counseling before an abortion as well as a law that bans advanced practice clinicians from performing the procedure.

🤡 Try new memes: The kids really do not like Elon Musk. A new poll finds that an endorsement from Musk would make 26% of young voters less likely to vote for a political candidate and just 12% of young voters more likely to vote for one. At -14 net impact, Musk is the second-most radioactive celebrity of the 42 tested in the survey.

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The Plan to Expose and Exploit Supreme Court Scandals

When asked whether he planned to investigate why Samuel Alito had an upside-down flag flying outside his home days after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin raised the white flag.

“No, we haven’t got anything planned. I think he’s explained his situation. The American public understands what he did,” Durbin told reporters on Monday. “But I don’t think there’s much to be gained with a hearing at this point. I think he should recuse himself from cases involving Trump and his administration.”

The response was a perfect encapsulation of the learned — and maybe deliberate — helplessness that has guided Democratic leaders’ response to the increasingly outrageous Supreme Court corruption scandals that have emerged over the past year. 

Republican mega-donors have been allowed to ignore subpoenas. Justices have been given free passes for not disclosing millions of dollars in gifts and related conflicts of interests. And now Durbin is refusing to look into Alito’s apparent support for the Jan. 6th insurrection, despite other Democrats and even some Republicans saying that it should be looked into. 

Not even today’s breaking revelation that Alito flew a flag reappropriated by Christian nationalist “Stop the Steal” lunatics at his beach house has shaken him from cowardly acquiesence.

A moment that calls for hyper-vigilance has been infected with lethargy and negligence. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and instead of exposing the networks of dark money, law firms, churches, and unnerving billionaires that fuel a Supreme Court bent on reshaping the country into a fundamentalist kleptocracy, Democrats have just given up on the issue. 

That Democrats don’t have the votes in Congress to impeach the corrupt jurists is no reason, politically or legally, to acquiesce to two cranks engineering a hostile takeover of government and society.

A new poll finds that public trust in the Supreme Court is near an all-time low, practically serving a winning issue to Democrats on a silver platter. Investigations are also a moral imperative with reproductive rights, federal regulation of big business, fair elections, and the fate of public education all hanging in the balance.

So what can be done?

There are some strong advocates of court reform in the party, but Democratic lawmakers have largely felt little pressure to move toward taking an aggressive line on the matter. Looking to change that dynamic is United for Democracy, a coalition of 140 issue and community groups that just kicked off a $10 million campaign to elevate the Supreme Court into a top-tier election issue and advocate for reform. 

I spoke last week with the organization’s campaign director, Stasha Rhodes, about where things stand now and United for Democracy’s plans to change them. 

United for Democracy has been around a year now. What specifically brought so many different groups together? 

We launched with the idea that the Supreme Court has been captured by extremists who favor the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations over workers and families, and who put their own bias and beliefs above our nation's laws, and use the court to help the powerful gain more power while the American people pay the price. 

The MAGA supermajority has overturned abortion rates, weakened voter access, blocked student loan relief, made it harder to fight the climate crisis, and easier to flood our communities with guns. And so issue groups from across our movement came together to basically say, we want to use our collective power to fight back.

So what does fighting back look like in this case? Because nobody in DC seems to care.

Our number one priority has been really to focus on connecting the issues to the Supreme Court to Americans outside of Washington. And so we felt like the first step to even creating a political environment necessary to pass reforms was creating more awareness for Americans outside of Washington so that folks understood that there is a serious issue with the Supreme Court. 

What’s most important for people to know is that we're not upset because we don't agree with the issues. It's not sour grapes over the decisions. This court has become too politically biased and way too powerful and they're making decisions by overturning long-standing precedent and ignoring judicial norms.

Within the next year, we're going to be looking at policy solutions and reforms to promote, but a lot of that depends on what happens this year. And so we have been focused on making sure that we create the momentum and the necessary narrative to make those reforms possible.

Which specific things are you identifying and making part of the campaign? There are a lot of options!

The Supreme Court is increasingly using the shadow docket, which people, states, or companies that lost in lower courts can ask the Supreme Court to block a lower court's order while the case moves through appeal. It sometimes takes months to make decisions, in hugely consequential cases without full briefing oral arguments, or any written opinion. 

Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the Supreme Court was asked by the government a total of eight times for emergency relief and got their way four times. The Trump administration asked for emergency relief 41 times and got it 28 times. The court is able to make consequential decisions like the mifepristone case using the shadow docket. 

Number two, we're seeing them overturn long-standing precedents — look at the Roe case or Affirmative Action — with really no legal rationale in the first place. We've seen them ignore standing rules. A lot of the cases from last term were centered on questionable standing. And then, of course, the ethics issues have run rampant. Whether it's Clarence Thomas and the jet and the house, everyday it feels like there's a bombshell release of unethical activity.

People will follow and believe insanely complicated conspiracy theories while having little patience for reality. Some of that stuff is pretty wonky and seemingly esoteric, so how do you make it approachable?

It can be wonky. We've left the wonky and esoteric language out of our message and really focused on the importance of the issues that we all care about, because this Supreme Court has become a power center for those issues. And their rulings are not academic. They impact our everyday life, from the water we drink, from our school safety, to our very personal healthcare decisions. These are tangible impacts that they're making

Conservatives figured out decades ago how to translate voter displeasure over Supreme Court decisions into winning campaign issues and top priorities for their elected officials. And it's no secret that progressives are far behind on this work. But we feel like we have an opportunity over the coming months to turn this around.

Trump and his allies created and empowered this corrupt court and Americans are deeply unhappy with the results, but not enough of them understand where to point the finger for the SCOTUS decisions they hate. And we think that needs to change. There’s a recent poll that showed only 24% of voters blame Trump for the Dobbs decision and subsequent abortion decisions. And only 34% blame congressional Republicans who helped President Trump confirm this mega super majority. 

This means that people who share our values — including the vast majority of folks, no matter which party, who consider themselves pro-choice — largely blame the Supreme Court alone, or in some cases we've seen they blame President Biden since it happened under his leadership. And for us, this is as serious a problem as it is a significant opportunity for progressives.

Over the coming months, our relentless campaign will raise the profile of the Supreme Court as a major threat to American freedoms, and therefore a key consideration when [voters] make their decisions about who should control the nomination and confirmation process in 2025. 

What does this campaign look like?

We’ve focused on four states — it's a national campaign, but we have a more focused approach in four states: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, we've already started knocking doors. We plan to knock on thousands of doors and have earned media operations. So we're doing op-eds and press calls. We've already hosted two events in Pennsylvania, and we're launching a $1 million paid ad buy in the next week. And we expect to do the same thing really soon in Michigan and Wisconsin. We think that we have to take this narrative outside of the Beltway and directly to kitchen tables across the country.

It’d be nice if Democratic leaders were at all helpful, but they don’t seem interested. How do you hold them accountable?

There are few moments where the Supreme Court is top of mind for most folks, but week after week, month after month, as we learn more about the unethical behavior [of justices], it's more of an opportunity for Congress to take action. They have enough evidence, so I think what we're missing is Congressional courage to take the steps. So if constituents across the country are not calling their members, we're going to continue to see inaction. We're hoping to really drive the pressure and momentum that's necessary for Congress to do something.

Do those calls work? 

I think that there's growing interest. A number of progressives have started to pay attention to what this court is doing. And most importantly, a number of progressives see that they have huge priorities that this Court inevitably will roll back. And so they're thinking about this — we want them to think about it a bit faster. So we're making sure that they hear from their constituents, but we need more action, and we need it fast.

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