Ever since 1964, when Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Bill and went on to become the Republican presidential nominee that summer, the Republicans’ solicitude for the civil rights of minority groups has dwindled to near-nonexistence. It was the Republican justices on the Supreme Court who nullified the potency of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans who revived a bigoted nativism, and, more recently, Republicans who’ve endeavored to re-run the anti-Black law-‘n-order and preserve-white-suburbia campaigns of the 1960s and ‘70s.
But a
transformation has come over Republican ideology in recent years. Long the opponent of minority rights, they have now become opponents of majority rule as well. Even a cursory glance at the nation’s shifting demographics has convinced them that they themselves have become a minority, which explains the party’s attempts to lock in its power now, before electoral verdicts sweep it away. Hence its hysterical zeal to pack the one branch of government that is supposed to protect minority rights – the courts – in the expectation that the one minority their judges and justices can be counted on to protect will be themselves, the Republican Party.
As liberals once looked to Brown v Board of Education as the paradigmatic example of what the Court could do to advance minority rights, conservatives look to Bush v Gore as their own paradigmatic example of what the Court could do to advance Republican interests in elections. And by striking down the Voting Rights Act, ruling for big money in Citizens United, and refusing to undo patently partisan gerrymandering in a host of cases, successive Republican Court majorities have perpetuated Republicans’ political control, even as actual voters have increasingly been rejecting it at the polls.
The determination that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have shown to place one more diehard Republican on the Court before Election Day reveals the full extent of their concern for minority rights. Both need a Court that will enable or, if needs be,
fabricate Republican victories. Surely, this must be what the Founders had in mind.
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