The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court is Reshaping America

by Ian Millhiser

Overview

What will a conservative Supreme Court do with its power?

From 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, until the present, Congress enacted hardly any major legislation outside of the tax law President Trump signed in 2017. In the same period, the Supreme Court dismantled much of America's campaign finance law, severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, permitted states to opt-out of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, weakened laws protecting against age discimination and sexual and racial harassment, and held that every state must permit same-sex couples to marry. This powerful unelected body, now controlled by six very conservative Republicans, has and will become the locus of policymaking in the United States.

Ian Millhiser, Vox's Supreme Court correspondent, tells the story of what those six justices are likely to do with their power. It is true that the right to abortion is in its final days, as is affirmative action. But Millhiser shows that it is in the most arcane decisions that the Court will fundamentally reshape America, transforming it into something far less democratic, by attacking voting rights, dismantling and vetoing the federal administrative state, ignoring the separation of church and state, and putting corporations above the law. The Agenda exposes a radically altered Supreme Court whose powers extend far beyond transforming any individual right—its agenda is to shape the very nature of America's government, redefining who gets to have legal rights, who is beyond the reach of the law, and who chooses the people who make our laws.

"Ian Millhiser offers a perfect short read for a key moment in U.S. constitutional history." —The Guardian

"A cogent, timely warning about the fragility of American democracy." —Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781734420760
Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Pages:	143
Sales rank:	202,835
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. Before joining Vox, he was a columnist at ThinkProgress. He is the author of Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Yale Law & Policy Review. He received his J.D. from Duke Universityand clerked for judge Eric L. Clay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

A perfect short read for a key moment in US constitutional history.” —Guardian

“In this short and very accessible work ... Millhiser makes a strong case that Americans should be worried about what a Supreme Court shaped in no small part by Donald Trump’s three appointees—Trump, who defeated Hillary Clinton with almost 3 million fewer votes—will mean for the future of our nation and our democracy.” — Geoffrey R. Stone, Washington Post

“Millhiser argues persuasively that the Supreme Court, with its Republican majority, ‘is potentially an existential threat to the Democratic party’s national ambitions—and, more importantly, to liberal democracy in the United States’.... A cogent, timely warning about the fragility of American democracy.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Ian Millhiser offers an engaging, accessible and well-informed statement of progressive anxieties about what the Supreme Court’s newly strengthened conservative majority may do.” —Zachary Price, SCOTUSblog

From the Publisher

2021-03-13
A biting critique of the current Supreme Court.

Lawyer Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, argues persuasively that the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, “is potentially an existential threat to the Democratic Party’s national ambitions—and, more importantly, to liberal democracy in the United States.” With Congress increasingly partisan and dysfunctional, the author asserts that the court has exerted decisive policy changes: dismantling campaign finance law and weakening the Voting Rights Act, the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, laws shielding workers from sexual and racial harassment, public sector unions’ ability to raise funds, and Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Along with examining the judicial backgrounds of the Republican-appointed judges, Millhiser looks closely at salient cases in four areas that reveal the court’s conservative bias: voting rights, limitations on federal power, expression of religion, and the right to sue. As for voting, the author clearly shows how the court’s decisions work against the election of Democrats by allowing redistricting laws that favor Republicans, thereby transforming legislative elections “into little more than a formality in many states.” Limiting federal regulatory power also favors a conservative agenda, for example, impeding the government in addressing climate change. “This fight over the federal government’s power to address a slow-moving catastrophe,” Millhiser writes, “is just one battle in a many-front war over federal agencies’ power to regulate.” In addition, court decisions regarding religion have opened the possibility that business owners may claim religious objections to following anti-discrimination laws or even paying taxes. Because judges have “no democratic legitimacy,” the responsibility to shape policy must lie with Congress. Deferring to the court “means placing unchecked power in the hands of men and women who serve for life, and who may be no less partisan than the people who can be voted out of office if they use their power irresponsibly.”

A cogent, timely warning about the fragility of American democracy.

Kirkus Reviews