(Almost) Everything That Happened This Corrupt Supreme Court Term

It’s been a brazenly partisan and corrupt Supreme Court term. From abortion cases that are still alive to the murky futures of marriage equality and gender-affirming care for minors, here’s a brief wrap-up of what happened by what should’ve been the end of this term.

Abortion cases remain unresolved

Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative cohorts straight up handed Republicans a gift when they temporarily punted both FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Idaho v. United States off the docket.

Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade two years ago, Republicans have faced electoral loss after electoral loss thanks to abortion-motivated voters. Roberts and his fellow conservatives took away a political hot potato for Donald Trump months before a presidential election where abortion is already a central issue. But the procedural rulings in both cases means the real issues before the Court—mifepristone access and the ability to mail abortion pills under the Comstock Act, as well as the fate of emergency abortion care in abortion-hostile states—remain unresolved and very much still alive in the federal courts.

This buys Republicans time to message around the devastation Roe’s reversal has brought while setting them up to continue the carnage soon after this election season. It also allows the conservatives on the Court to message that, despite dismantling Roe, they aren’t that extreme on abortion after all, because look at these two wins for abortion rights!

Never mind, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson points out in her opinion in Idaho v. United States, the three dissenting justices softly endorsing fetal “personhood” and states’ ability to nullify federal law in the EMTALA case.

Slow drip of corruption scandals

This term, reports revealed how conservative justices and their wives have engaged in various forms of hyper-partisanship and financial conflicts of interests.

Between Harlan Crow functioning as a fiscal sponsor to Justice Clarence Thomas’ household and Mary-Ann Alito low-key auditioning for Real Housewives of Potomac, the Court is an embarrassment. The fact that Roberts and his fellow conservatives feel they are beyond the reach of Congress is a warning flare about the state of our democracy and the authoritarianism knocking at our doorstep.

Warning shot at marriage equality

While we’re on the topic of warning flares, the Court issued a major one on marriage equality in Department of State v. Muñoz, an immigration case that narrowed the scope of marriage rights in a way that tees up a rollback—or outright reversal—of Obergefell v. Hodges.

Support for marriage equality continues to decrease among conservatives as their ginned up moral panic around “wokeness” increases. This translates to a proliferation of drag bans and book bans that are designed to do nothing more than peddle gender conformity, as Lisa Needham wrote about recently for Rewire News Group.

It also underlines the conservative rewriting of parental rights via their campaign to judicially redefine family in a way that elevates and enshrines largely white, religiously orthodox, patriarchal family norms. We see this in their legal attacks on teen access to birth control under Title X and support for gender-affirming care bans.

Coming up next term

It will be clearer just how deep the conservative hypocrisy around parental rights and gender-affirming care for minors runs when the Court rules in United States v. Skrmetti next term. Skrmetti is a case brought by three trans teens and their parents, a doctor who provides gender-affirming care, and joined by the Biden administration, that challenges the constitutionality of Tennessee and Kentucky’s gender-affirming care bans.

The Court declined to take up the parental rights issue in Skrmetti, instead focusing its attention on the sole issue of whether these bans violate the equal protection clause as unlawful sex discrimination. But the current conservative parental rights frame will be everywhere in these arguments, both to scatter the breadcrumbs of the next case for conservatives and to continue virtue signaling to conservative donors financing this anti-wokeness campaign.

Overturning Roe really was the beginning of a whole new power grab by the conservative legal movement. And if this term is any indication, it is just the start of a new wave of cooperative, authoritarian governing between the Republican Party and the Supreme Court.

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