A Backlash Against the Trumpified Supreme Court is Possible but not Guaranteed

by | Jul 8, 2022 | Politics | 5 comments

The United States Supreme Court is making every Republican promise real. For decades, GOP politicians have pandered to their party’s extreme wing with pledges to enact an agenda quite far to the right of the median voter’s preferences. Swing voters largely shrugged, assuming that the Republican candidates they voted for could never be as unreasonable as their rhetoric implied. And for decades, this equilibrium held.

Until, perhaps, now.

Donald Trump’s Supreme Court has essentially fulfilled the empty promises that Republicans made to their base for 50 years. Most prominently, they have overturned Roe v. Wade, paving the way for half the country to ban women’s ability to obtain an abortion. But they have also invited organized prayer back into the public schools of a country that is far more secular than it was when the Warren court prohibited school prayer in 1963. They have sharply proscribed state governments’ ability to regulate guns at a time when rage and despair over the country’s gun-violence epidemic is widespread. And they have kneecapped President Biden’s efforts to combat the climate crisis. Overall, this paints a very reactionary picture.

So American swing voters find themselves in a dramatically more reactionary country today than they did before the Supreme Court issued its rulings for 2022. The die is cast. Republican policies that many Americans never believed could become law are now active in our portfolio of public policies. For swing-district Republicans, it’s no longer possible to continue the double game with winks and nods to the far right while reassuring moderate voters that, when elected, the GOP’s focus will be on mainstream concerns about taxes and economic growth. America is about to see–is already seeing–what forty years of extremist politics looks like unleashed by a Trumpified Supreme Court.

The question is whether swing voters will stage a backlash. And there’s a case study from North Carolina that indicates yes, a backlash may indeed come. In 2013, the state Republican Party rammed through an extreme agenda of astonishing reach. They cut unemployment benefits, enacted a “Monster Voting Law,” slashed education, drastically expanded the places where people could legally carry guns, and restricted abortion. This extremism became an albatross around their necks as time proceeded toward the midterm election. For her part, Senator Kay Hagan made her entire reelection campaign a referendum on then-state House Speaker Thom Tillis’s support for education cuts.

2014 was a red wave and Hagan lost her seat in it. But she came far, far closer to winning reelection than incumbents in other parts of the country, largely because she ran on a backlash against unpopular Republican policy. In the part of the state most keenly aware of ongoing extremism, that being Wake County, there was actually a Democratic wave, carrying the party to a 7-0 sweep in country commission races and numerous legislative victories. Statewide, the party couldn’t overcome a national environment that tanked for Democrats as part of President Obama’s “six-year itch.” But there was hell to pay for an NCGOP that had gone too far. That’s at least somewhat reassuring for Democrats as they enter the second half of a 2022 that had heretofore looked highly forbidding.

5 Comments

  1. Gregory Weeks

    This is just the beginning….worse is yet to come. Read Steven M. Teles’ book “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle For Control Of The Law.” The ultimate goal of the GOP was to control the courts and they have achieved that goal through the USSC appointments recently made. We will be seeing the results for the next 25 plus years…disenfranchisement of minorities, intrusion into personal liberties, etc. The recent anti-abortion rulings are a prelude in terms of other aspects of life that will be dictated by a “racist” regime. Speaking of the abortion ruling, it’s consistent with their policies….”we strongly believe that all life matters but, once a child is born he/she is on his own…..we won’t do a thing to provide them with opportunities.

  2. JB

    I must have missed the hell that the NCGOP had to pay. From my window it looks like they still control Jones Street, and are still the test bed for the worst of GOP policies. The legislature is still not representative of the political makeup of the state, nor are the Congressional maps. HB2 was only beaten back by corporate America’s revulsion, and Amendment One was only forestalled by Obergefell, which could be reversed any day now if Clarence Thomas gets his wife’s way about it. Most of that unpopular tax revision and the voting restrictions that poll do badly are still on the books, with the edges barely singed. Our schools are still underfunded and Jones Street is still appropriating public money for unregulated charter schools that have no accountability and no curriculum standards. And the burden of generating revenue has been entirely removed from corporate interests, leaving the wage earners to pick up the tab.

    I’m sure that this kind of hell to pay has Art Pope laughing all the way to the bank.

    Backlash indeed.

    • Elizabeth H Freeman

      Yes… an important POV to incorporate. Absolutely essential for many more of us little guys to get militant..

  3. Andy Stevens

    The best at losing is still a loser….

  4. Mike Leonard

    The job of Putin’s puppet was to wreck our government, divide our country, and screw over everybody who wasn’t rich and white. He did his best before we were able to get rid of him.

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