'Make no mistake about it': Op-ed warns an elite 'supermajority' has already won 2024

Republicans are not the victors of a tumultuous campaign week that saw President Joe Biden flub his first debate and former President Donald Trump win a landmark Supreme Court ruling — the oligarchy is, a new analysis contends.

Slate writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern presented an alternative Wednesday to the predominant political narrative that Biden’s campaign is nosediving while a newly disciplined Trump reaps the benefit.

Rather than look at the face of the political parties, they raise the specter of Supreme Court rulings they say demonstrate a cataclysmic governmental shift.

“Make no mistake about it,” the pair write, “When a court that has been battered by near-weekly reports of undisclosed oligarch-funded vacations (and gifts and super yachts and tricked out RVs and secret conferences with high-paying Koch supporters getting access to justices) decides to make it easier to bribe public officials—as it did in Snyder v. U.S.—that’s a very public signal that the conservative supermajority does not care what you think.”

The Slate editorial shifts its gaze away from red versus blue and toward the growing powers they say the nation’s political elite managed to wrestle away from the federal government.

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The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision was only one of many rulings they argue dismantle checks and balances and channel power toward a strengthening epicenter of government.

“The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees are sympathetic to wealthy individuals and corporations, so they will contort the law to help them,” write Lithwick and Stern.

“The court has placed itself at the apex of the state, agreeing to share power only with a strongman president who seeks to govern in line with the conservative justices’ vision.”

The pair argue the federal checks dismantled in three under-the-radar rulings made in the past week — one obliterating a statute of limitations on government regulation challenges and another a mandate that courts rely on agency know-how — imperil basic necessities of daily American life.

“That is how American government has functioned for well over a century, to the great benefit of the citizenry,” write Lithwick and Stern.

”It’s why there is clean air and drinkable, water and airplanes that stay in the sky and drugs that don’t kill us.”

Unfortunately, while the pair present their readers with a specific vision of an imminent catastrophic future, they don’t have specifics on what an actionable solution might entail.

“Public outrage has somehow made the court more reckless,” the Slate writers conclude. “The time for wishful thinking about the power of shame, institutional legitimacy, and historical legacy is over. The time for action may well be now or never.”