Today’s Galaxy-Brained “You Don’t Have to Care About Supreme Court” Take

Jesus Christ, how many of these are we going to see between now and November:

in SCOTUS’s 2019 term:

-RBG agreed w/ the conservative majority 73.9% of the time
-Sotomayor 73.9%
-Breyer 78.3%
-Kagan 82.6%

most decisions are 9-0. the ones that aren’t should fall under the political question doctrine anyway

your “but SCOTUS?!” argument might be hyperbolic— Aisha Ahmad (@aishaismad) April 9, 2020

It is true, and beside the point, that most Supreme Court decisions are decided unanimously or near-unanimously and are not particularly politically salient. But the remaining cases are hugely important and generally are decided by straight party-line votes. Ahmad dismisses these cases because…she would prefer in theory that the Court not decide them, even though they in fact will. Okey-dokey.

Also, her subsequent claim that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the wings of the Court on workplace discrimination is astoundingly ignorant:

I can’t believe one of her examples for why SCOTUS doesn’t matter was “workplace rights.” https://t.co/YfeuOPmtP3— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) April 10, 2020

And then there’s consumer protection. And labor rights! We could go on and on here. I’d also have to say that a week in which the Republican wing of Supreme Court gave the matador’s cape to a blatantly stolen election that will get people killed — as part of a years-long war on voting rights — is not the ideal context for your “who cares who the median vote on the Supreme Court is?” takes.

Conservatives have controlled the median vote on the Supreme Court since 1969 and yet have gotten mobilization advantages out of their base being much more outraged against the (increasingly small) number of decisions that do go against them. For people on the left who should know better to continue to lie about what’s at stake as the median vote moves even further right is absolutely unforgivable.