Sirota: Stephen Breyer's Replacement Needs To Be an Anti-Corporate Jurist
David breaks it down, plus a look at the John Fetterman campaign
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced Wednesday he is retiring at the end of this court term, setting up a political fight over his replacement.
Breyer, 83, resisted for over a year calls from progressives and liberals to step down and avoid another Ruth Bader Ginsburg situation. Now that he’s retiring, President Joe Biden can fill the seat with a Democratic Senate set to confirm.
Biden’s nominee will have to meet with approval of all Democrats in the upper chamber due to the party’s slimmest possible majority. And senators on the Democratic right are emboldened, with victories over their own party’s president piling up.
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It’s a lot to digest. Luckily, I have just the person to help break down the political maneuvering—David Sirota, founder of The Daily Poster, an independent media outlet that’s been breaking news in Washington for over a year.
A portion of David’s article from Wednesday, “Another Supreme Court Corporatist Would Be A Disaster,” is below.
David is going to join me on Callin this afternoon at 5pm EST for a live chat on the court and Breyer’s record.
If you’d like to follow along live and call in with questions and comments, go to the iPhone App Store, download the Callin app, and subscribe to The Flashpoint podcast. You’ll get a notification when we’re about to go live and can join us for the show.
We hope to see you then!
“Another Supreme Court Corporatist Would Be A Disaster”
Though most of the Supreme Court discourse revolves around hot-button social issues, the high court is first and foremost big business’s cannon aimed squarely at the American worker and at the livable ecosystem that supports human life. The upcoming battle over Justice Stephen Breyer’s replacement will only be an opportunity to start fixing this emergency if the nomination discourse, advocacy, and decision making acknowledges that this is the big judicial problem — one that has helped turn America’s economy into a corporate dystopia.
On one level, Breyer reportedly retiring is welcome news because it provides a rare opportunity for lawmakers other than Republicans to put someone on the court who doesn’t resemble a villain from The Handmaid's Tale. But with corporate America’s stranglehold on policy — from health care to labor to climate — it’s not enough to merely get an appointee who checks some important demographic boxes and isn’t a religious zealot.
With so much of the court’s day-to-day work focused on corporate cases rather than on social policy, the moment calls not merely for some younger version of Breyer, who has pretended the court is not inherently rigged in favor of corporate power — even though it quite obviously is.
Instead, this moment begs for a jurist whose life experience and record shows a commitment to prioritizing American workers and the environment — and breaking with the most powerful lobbying group in America: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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Read the rest at The Daily Poster.
In other news, I wrote about John Fetterman’s run for Senate in Pennsylvania.
You can find the article at Blue Tent; here’s an excerpt:
As lieutenant governor, Fetterman has been able to make inroads into rural and urban Pennsylvania alike. Most Senate candidates are restricted in one way or another to one of the two; Democrats will concentrate on cities and Republican rural and suburban areas. Fetterman’s campaign told Blue Tent that the candidate, in his official state capacity, visited all 67 Pennsylvania counties during a listening tour about legalizing cannabis.
In a purple state like Pennsylvania, where Democrats and Republicans go back and forth in their control of the state and some areas are as deep red as the big cities are deep blue, an all-hands approach could catapult Fetterman to Washington.
“While Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are critical, the small counties are also important,” Fetterman said in February 2021. “It’s never urban vs. rural. It’s got to be urban and rural.”
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