The World the Green Party Gave Us: Canceled Abortion Rights, Besieged Voting Rights, and Concocted Gun Rights
The World the Green Party Gave Us: Canceled Abortion Rights, Besieged Voting Rights, and Concocted Gun Rights
Thanks to Ralph Nader’s year 2000 run for president, right-wing justices have been shaping American life for over 20 years. Jill Stein’s run could empower 20 more years of reactionary stewardship.
As Jill Stein sees it, choosing between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is not even a matter of voting for the “lesser of two evils.” “There is no lesser evil in this race,” says the Green Party candidate. In Stein’s view, it makes no difference whether Trump or Harris becomes president.
This is as deranged, in its way, as Donald Trump’s slander that Haitian immigrants are “eating the dogs, they are eating the cats.” The Green Party’s standard-bearer is apparently so out of touch with reality that she cannot recognize that one (but only one) of our two major parties has become a fascist entity. And she seems to regard it as of little concern that the G.O.P.’s Hitler-admiring leader Donald Trump plans to exercise dictatorial power if he becomes president.
I won’t try to refute Stein’s bizarre claim of equivalence. Anyone who actually believes Trump and Harris are pretty much the same is beyond my powers of persuasion. And many have already written about the horrors we can expect to unfold almost immediately should Trump assume power. Millions of undocumented immigrants rounded up for deportation. Military operations against those Trump deems “the enemy within.” A wave of vigilante violence against criminals actual or imagined. Reversing whatever progress we’ve made against climate change. Applying the Comstock Act to cripple access to medical abortion. White supremacist aggression against people of color, Jews, LGBTQ people normalized.
But there is another profound threat, one potentially longer-enduring. The right-wing ideologues who now control the U.S. Supreme Court are already implementing a dangerous agenda for reshaping America. They seek through judicial dominance to craft a government beyond the power of majorities, a government that collapses the modern state’s protective functions. They seek a government dominated by corporate power, which scorns safeguarding the dignity and rights of people of color and other minorities and abandons the needy and the vulnerable.
What happened in the wake of the 2000 election stands as a cautionary tale
To appreciate the scope of the danger, we need to talk about how we find ourselves so far along the path our right-wing judicial guardians has been paving. And to consider who, notwithstanding their good intentions, have actually assisted them. We need to turn to the year 2000 election, in whose long tail we are still living.
This might seem ancient history to many Americans weren’t born or were under 10 years of age back then. But what took place in 2000 stands as a vital cautionary tale.
The Green Party’s presidential candidate that year, the respected consumer advocate Ralph Nader, told voters that Democratic Party candidate Al Gore and Republican Party candidate George W. Bush were “Tweedledee and Tweedledum.” “They look and act the same,” said Nader, “so it doesn't matter which you get.” Many swallowed Nader’s assurances and voted Green Party.
The 2000 election was a cliff-hanger, the outcome turning on who won the state of Florida. And the election there was a mess, with a misleading ballot form confusing thousands into voting for the wrong candidate; tens of thousands of lawful African American voters wrongfully purged from the voting rolls; and defective voting devices making it uncertain for whom many thousands had cast their ballots.
A recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court sought to bring clarity to the election result. But Bush filed a lawsuit in federal court, and the U.S. Supreme Court intervened. Five conservative justices froze the Florida vote count at a point when George W. Bush was 537 votes ahead, thereby handing the presidency to him. (The writer of this article was the author of a full-page New York Times ad at the time, signed by 673 law professors, denouncing the decision as the “act of political partisans, not judges of a court of law.”)
The Supreme Court’s right-wingers would not have had a chance to steal the election on behalf of Bush if Ralph Nader hadn’t been on the ballot.
Bush won by 537 votes. Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida. In Nader’s book, Crashing the Party, Nader pointed to polling which showed that if he had not run, 38% of those who voted for him would have voted for Gore and 25% would have voted for Bush. Do the math. By Nader’s own reckoning, had Nader not run, Gore would have had over 12,600 more votes over Bush, and would have won an unquestionable victory.
The U.S. Supreme Court selected Bush to be president. He returned the favor by appointing two right-wing judges to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
But for George W. Bush’s two Supreme Court justices — but for Ralph Nader — Roe v. Wade would not have been overruled, gun “rights” would not be enshrined, Citizens United would not have been decided, and voting rights would be protected
For over two decades since then Roberts and Alito have made decisions at the Supreme Court that have transformed life in America — for the worse. In the 5-4 Citizens United case, they unleashed the corrupting power of big money in American politics. Bush’s two appointees were indispensable to the five-judge majority that so ruled. Had two liberals been on the court instead, no Citizens United decision.
Similarly, in Shelby County v. Holder (also 5-4), conservatives eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, prompting a tsunami of G.O.P. voter suppression laws. District of Columbia v. Heller (5-4) fabricated a personal right to firearms, and follow-up decisions on gun control have made it essentially impossible to address school shootings. And in 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (6-3), Roberts, Alito and the other right-wing justices overturned Roe v. Wade and canceled the constitutional right to abortion.
Every one of those society-shaping and (literally) life-threatening decisions would have gone the other way if the two Bush appointees had not been on the Supreme Court. Because the Green Party ran a presidential candidate in 2000, we had no President Gore to appoint two liberals instead of Roberts and Alito.
The world we live in today was in substantial part created by the Green Party’s decision to run Ralph Nader for president in 2000.
The right-wingers aren’t through. During the current Supreme Court term, the two Bush judges provided the essential margin, again, for Supreme Court majorities that bestowed immunity on Donald Trump, dismissed charges against January 6 criminals, allowed the sale of devices that turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns, and gave conservative judges more power over complex issues of regulatory power — such as climate change, food and drug safety, the stability of financial institutions, health insurance, and clean air and water standards — than expert government agencies authorized by Congress.
The right wing’s war on the “administrative state” is a war against the protective, regulatory state.
Will the 6-3 conservative majority become a 5-4 liberal majority? Or will reactionary Supreme Court justices supervise our nation for another generation?
Why does this matter now? Justice Clarence Thomas is 76 years old, and Samuel Alito, 74. If Harris were elected, in the next four or eight years she might well have the opportunity to replace them — transforming the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority into a 5-4 liberal majority. If, on the other hand, Trump were re-elected, Thomas and Alito would likely retire during Trump’s term (and perhaps John Roberts as well), allowing Trump to replace them with right-wing judges now in their 40s. This would cement the right-wing hold on the judiciary for one or two generations to come.
In short, the succession at the Supreme Court is up for grabs.
The right-wingers on the Supreme Court are playing a long game, and the stakes are high for all of us. Whether or not they really admire Donald Trump, they are prepared to remove any obstacles (like criminal law and voting rights) that might impede Trump’s return to power. They obviously believe that protecting the Supreme Court’s supremacy — today and also for decades to come, after a younger generation of right-winger jurists have been installed — is worth putting a fascist into the White House.
Depending on just how close the election is, the rightist justices may have their opportunity to intervene for the Republicans this year. As in 2000, the Green Party could contribute to narrowing the outcome. An election result balanced on a razor’s edge will certainly become more likely if too many believe that voting for an impure candidate sullies their hands, and that they would have no responsibility for Trump’s victory when they could have, but declined to, vote against him.
In the early 1930s, on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to absolute power, the German Communist Party refused to ally with the Social Democrats to stop the Nazis. Instead, their strategy was expressed in their slogan, “Nach Hitler, Uns.” After Hitler, us. As they were soon to learn, there was no “after” for them, nor for millions of others. Possibly the Green Party sees its relationship with today’s Republican Party from a similarly delusional perspective.
American constitutional democracy seems immutable, but its meaning and substance have always been contested Still, it is worth protecting against a movement led by an Hitler admirer who is aided and abetted by blinkered zealots claiming to be of the left. Let’s not blind ourselves to the need to accept a less-than-ideal candidate if the march of Trump’s MAGA fascists is to be halted.