According to her bio on the New York Times website, Kate Andrias is a professor of constitutional law and labor law at Columbia Law School, who studies the role of social movements in changing law. She seems very much the woman for the moment!
Andrias writes [gift link]:
The Constitution Doesn’t Belong to Trump or the Supreme Court
In case after case over the past eight months, a majority of justices on the Supreme Court have acquiesced to President Trump’s lawless and authoritarian actions, often without offering any explanation. The court has allowed the administration to summarily deport migrants to countries where they have no connection. It has condoned racial profiling by federal immigration officers. And it has suggested that it will jettison 90 years of precedent by holding that the president can fire, without cause, the heads of independent agencies. ...
... For the past two decades, Americans have watched the Roberts court dismantle constitutional rights and disable government from regulating in the public interest: overruling Roe v. Wade; invalidating limits on corporate campaign spending; striking down reasonable gun restrictions; and rolling back environmental safeguards.
But since the country’s founding, constitutional meaning has never emerged solely from an elite cadre of justices. Nor has judicial supremacy — what some call “juristocracy”— ever been the reality on the ground. When enough people have organized around a constitutional vision, they have managed to prevail even against a hostile Supreme Court.
Consider the fight for labor rights. During the early 20th century, the court repeatedly invalidated laws protecting unions; judges even jailed labor leaders who led strikes. When Congress, during the Great Depression, passed the National Labor Relations Act enshrining the rights to organize, bargain and strike, most observers believed the Supreme Court would deem the law unconstitutional. But workers organized to defend their rights, articulating a bold constitutional vision rooted in the First Amendment’s rights of free expression and association, the 13th Amendment’s promise of free labor and Congress’s regulatory authority. In the face of huge protests and strikes, and a threat from President Franklin Roosevelt to pack the court with more justices, the Supreme Court relented and upheld the statute. ...
Read it all for an introduction to another era in which the people had to overwhelm, democratically, another Supreme Court majority which tried to uphold an outmoded, cramped, and repressive former era of legal interpretation of American freedoms.
• • •
Meet a federal judge who is giving the Trump regime fits in DC.
• • •
Meanwhile the New Republic's legal commentator Matt Ford sees a truly dire precedent for the current moment.
Trump Is Following in the Footsteps of a Failed English King
Our Founders’ designs were studiously informed by the mistakes of King Charles I. Our president seems to want to repeat them. ...
...[Trump] would likely find a kindred spirit in Charles I, the seventeenth-century English king whose own taxation policies and preference for absolute rule led to civil war. Charles’s downfall during the English Civil War helped transition England from the divine right of kings to parliamentary supremacy. It also inspired the Founders as they built a republican government around rights and liberties on these shores. ...
Trump should probably note that the consequence to Charles I was loss of his head under an executioner's ax.
Free people don't take well to oligarchy and aspiring kings, though it may take us awhile to assert ourselves. Let us do so, firmly, without violence, knowing our forebears have shown the way.
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