Writing last week before the Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, James Fallows at the Atlantic suggested that by subverting one branch of government — the Judiciary, and in particular, the Supreme Court — Republican corporatist radicals are staging a slo-mo coup right before our eyes:
[Here is] a simple game you can try at home. Pick a country and describe a sequence in which:
- First, a presidential election is decided by five people, who don’t even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms.
- Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology.
- Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess and re-do existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them.
- Meanwhile their party’s representatives in the Senate abuse procedural rules to an extent never previously seen to block legislation — and appointments, especially to the courts.
- And, when a major piece of legislation gets through, the party’s majority on the Supreme Court prepares to negate it — even though the details of the plan were originally Republican proposals and even though the party’s presidential nominee endorsed these concepts only a few years ago.
How would you describe a democracy where power was being shifted that way?
So we dodged a bullet on the fifth step, but the decision by Chief Justice John Roberts to find a way to uphold the Heritage mandate in the Affordable Care Act has already unleashed a new level of rage on the right — and they see no irony in the fact that the very thing that is enraging them — the mandate — was their own party’s invention.
If the Obama White House and campaign and Democrats in Congress allow this groundswell of ignorance and anger about insurance reform to go unchecked, as they did in the lead-up to the midterms in 2010, they risk handing all three branches of the government to Republicans again. We saw what happened after 2000, when the Supreme Court installed Bush as president and Republicans won the House and Senate, thereby giving them control of all three branches of the government.
This time, however, if Mitt Romney wins and Republicans take Congress, it will be because moderate swing voters bought into the rage on the tea party right — as they did in 2010 — and Pres. Romney and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be under the thumb of the same radical fringe that has been giving marching orders to Speaker Boehner for the past two years.
