US Supreme Court divides between thorn and influence for Joe Biden

No one is completely safe on the US Supreme Court. Allegations of conflicts of interest from the most conservative to the most progressive members highlighted long-standing problems with the powerful US court this week.

With recent decisions reversing historic policies and programs of the Joe Biden administration, they threw even more fuel on the fire of an already unpopular court.

In the two-and-a-half years the Democrats have been in charge of the White House, the high court has blocked government plans for student loan relief, regulation of industrial pollutants, immigration rules and mandatory vaccinations or Covid tests for large corporations. The worst phase of the epidemic.

Banning universities from using race as a criterion for increasing diversity, it concluded that the right to freedom of expression would override anti-discrimination laws against LGBTQIA+ people. Abortion is a constitutional right, leaving room for at least 21 states to ban or restrict the practice.

This is a direct result of the court’s conservative majority carved out during the years of former President Donald Trump (2017-2021). Six of the nation’s nine most powerful justices are further to the right, raising the level of friction to the point where Biden says it’s “not a normal court.”

But the US president’s allies want him to raise his tone further and have tried to convince him to attack the company head-on, according to a report in the New York Times, which is already expected to be gutted by the courts. Should be in next year’s presidential election.

Biden has so far avoided using the handbook used by Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and confronting the STF head-on, saying it would undermine the institution itself and rejecting ideas proposed by Democrats to expand the number of judges to dilute conservative influence. .

“They’ve done a lot of damage, but if we start trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it in an unhealthy way forever, and it’s not going to reverse,” he said. In an interview with MSNBC. “I may be optimistic, but I believe that some on the court are beginning to feel that their legitimacy is being questioned in a way that it has not been in the past.”

Investigations mainly involve conflicts of interest. The first to be targeted was Judge Clarence Thomas, who was given lavish trips by the Republican businessman, according to the US press. This week, reports from the Associated Press showed that the problem is widespread: Aides to progressive Justice Sonia Sotomayor are pressuring universities where the magistrate speaks to buy hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of her books for their libraries. According to the investigation, Michigan State University reportedly purchased 11,000 copies.

It is highly unlikely that this pressure would lead to the forced removal of one of the justices, and only one in the entire history of the court has come close to losing office, in 1805, 16 years after the court’s founding—Samuel Chase, one of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence, who was impeached by the House on charges of bias, but later Acquitted by the Senate.

Even if Biden wins re-election in 2024, there is little chance of a political shift in the composition of the high court.

In the US, there is no mandatory retirement age as in Brazil (75 years). The court’s oldest justice is Clarence Thomas (the most conservative), 75, followed by Samuel Alito, 73. All three Trump nominees (Amy Connie Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanagh) are in their 50s.

Trump assumed the presidency in 2017 with two judges over the age of 80 — one retired, the other died in office — and, to replace them, nominated a third for an open vacancy at the time.

On the other hand, if Republicans return to the presidency and Thomas and Alito decide to leave the Supreme Court, a new White House leader can appoint young conservative justices and maintain the court’s current right-wing makeup for decades.

There’s another scenario: Even if Biden is re-elected, if Republicans gain control of the Senate, they could block more progressive nominations because presidential nominees must be vetted by the U.S. Legislature. This already happened in 2016, when then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, nominated Merrick Garland, who is now Justice Secretary. The then-Republican majority leader stopped the nomination, holding the vacant position until it was filled by Trump a year later.

It remains to be seen what impact the recent Supreme Court rulings will have on voter mobilization, but political scientist Ken Coleman, a professor at the University of Michigan, says “the abortion decision will have an even bigger impact on next year’s presidential election.”

A change in the understanding of abortion was seen as the basis for legislative elections that renewed the House and part of the Senate in the so-called midterms in November last year. Polls favored the Republican Party, but Democratic candidates gained traction even in conservative parts of the interior of the country, where women organized politically and registered to vote — suffrage is not mandatory in the U.S. — for anti-abortion candidates.

As a result, Democrats not only retained their majority in the Senate, but also increased against the grain of predictions. In the chamber, they lost, but by a narrower margin than previously predicted.

Democrats expect similar action next year as they maneuver to reverse the negative impact of the court’s recent rulings. Last Friday (14), Vice President Kamala Harris announced the implementation of another student loan relief program already announced last year, which cancels the student loans of 804,000 Americans by 39 billion US dollars (R$ 187 billion). Loans of more than 20 years, when the repayment amount is recalculated. He said the government is finalizing a new plan to calculate loans based on borrowers’ income, which could cut repayments in half. (Thiago Amancio/Folhapress)

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