Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.
It was a historic week at the Supreme Court, as the conservative justices took a wrecking ball to some segments of society and (barely) spared a few of Americans’ most basic constitutional rights.
The court handed down eight decisions, some of which invented new standards to bully trans kids, gave the president carte blanche to fire regulators, and unleashed a torrent of dark money on our elections. They also Donald Trump several significant and embarrassing losses, though even those decisions come with intrigue and indications of future trouble.
I’m no lawyer, so to really understand these decisions, their implications, and the broader question of how the hell we are going to get out of this situation, I spoke with Lisa Graves, a former senior counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the co-founder of Court Accountability and True North Research. She’s also a cohost of Legal AF and author of Without Precedent, a book that chronicles Chief Justice John Roberts’s rise and how he has quietly defiled and rewritten the constitution again and again during his two decades at the Supreme Court.
Our conversation touched on all of those decisions and much more beyond; you can watch the whole thing above or excerpts below.
First up, I asked Graves about the court’s decision in NRSC v. Federal Election Commission, which repealed what thin veneer of campaign finance limitations remained. The decision removes the limits on the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate, opening the door for even more billionaire influence on elections. Graves explained the ins and outs of what it means and how it works:
Soon after, we moved on to another decision, where the court upheld birthright citizenship. It was certainly good news, but not unequivocally so, as four justices — one short of a majority! — were willing to accept a manufactured right-wing “theory” claiming that the 14th amendment does not mean what everyone has unanimously accepted it means for the past 150 years.
I wanted to understand how the hell we got to this point and whether these justices — who all attended the best law schools in the country and presumably have closely studied the constitution — were just being cynical opportunists or actually somehow believe the stupidest interpretation of tha amendment possible.
I spent much of the Biden administration campaigning for Senate Democrats to seriously investigate the blatant corruption on the court, particularly the clear bribes taken by many of the right-wing justices. Graves played a large role in breaking those stories with ProPublica
Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin did everything he could to avoid taking meaningful action, and over the past few years, I’ve theorized that the lack of consequences — or even a real investigation into the millions of dollars in gifts, trips, and financial help provided to the justices — emboldened them to author even more extreme rulings. Obviously, I asked Graves what she tought about that:
OK, let’s end on a hopeful note. Here, we talk about how we can stop the bleeding and reverse the damage being done to American democracy, civil rights, and human rights all across the world. The easy answer is Supreme Court reform, but what does that mean, exactly?
For Graves, it’s an expansive to-do list, and to give you a bit of hope going into this holiday weekend, she thinks it’s closer than it might seem.
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