Reflections on a diseased democracy
With a leader refusing to relinquish his grasp on authority after a definitive election and an uncontrolled virus ripping through the population at a rate of nearly 2000 deaths a day, America has become unrecognizable. But if you’re surprised, as the smug refrain goes, you haven’t been paying attention.
In the bleary aftermath of an election day stretching improbably over 107 hours, it may be challenging to cast one’s mind back to the September passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yet, in the following frantic weeks, it became clear that authoritarianism had now invaded all three branches of American democracy, destroying it from within like an autoimmune disease. In those weeks, Senators abandoned principle and precedent in favour of partisanship, confirming with astonishing efficiency a replacement Supreme Court Justice in the waning days of the presidency, thereby securing a 6-3 conservative majority on the bench for years to come.
Justice Ginsburg was not even buried before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pitched Amy Coney Barrett to the President as a replacement. In a farce too ridiculous for a sitcom, the nomination announcement hosted at the White House — during a pandemic — became a superspreader event. Most egregiously, when Justice Barrett was hurriedly confirmed by a margin of 52-48 votes in the Senate, she became the first Supreme Court nominee since 1869 to be confirmed without a single vote from the opposing party.
Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination raised a number of red flags. For progressives, Justice Barrett’s past writings and decisions represented a threat to reproductive freedom, LGBTQ2S+ rights, the Affordable Care Act, and gun control. Her resume was on the thin side: while judicial nominees are asked to detail 10 prior cases they have worked on, in her 2017 confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, she could only remember three from her two years of practice. During her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, she refused to answer a question on whether presidents must commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Most troubling was the fact that the presidential election was mere weeks away, and she could be confirmed just before the government lost the mandate to make another lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.
The 52 Republican Senators who voted to confirm a new Supreme Court Justice eight days before the presidential election paid no mind to the unprecedented timeline, the nominee’s relatively weak credentials, and the sheer hypocrisy of having denied the opportunity to Obama’s SCOTUS nominee nine months before the election based on the notion that the electorate should have a say. So much for the will of the people, the separation of powers, and public trust in the judiciary.
“They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come,” McConnell gloated on the Senate floor. Cementing a conservative judiciary triumphed above all other values: with Barrett’s confirmation, the founding principles of the American republic gave way to the will of the autocrat in the White House.
In so doing, the Senate enabled the slow creep of the authoritarian disease through the executive and the legislative and into the judiciary. Less than two hours after the vote, Justice Barrett was sworn in to the Supreme Court under bizarre circumstances, in a ceremony held at the White House under the cover of darkness at 9 p.m. “A judge declares independence not only from Congress and the President, but also from the private beliefs that might otherwise move her,” Justice Barrett incredibly — ludicrously — proclaimed from the South Lawn of the White House, minutes after Senators sealed her rushed confirmation vote. Evidently, irony died alongside the American democratic dream.
As I watched Justice Barrett posing with the President on a balcony above a cheering crowd, complete with glaring stage lights, a triumphant fanfare, and an excess of flags, it felt like watching a sinister parody of American patriotism: bloated with pageantry and power, exuberantly performative in its nationalism, and fatally exploding in a brilliant spectacle.
When afflicted with an autoimmune disease, the body’s own defensive and protective mechanisms are recruited in an assault against the integrity of the whole. It is this character that makes these diseases particularly insidious and difficult to treat. Similarly, it is this character that we have witnessed as we watch America’s emblems, patriotic myths, and fundamental institutions become perverted against the very principles upon which the republic was built: equality, liberty, and democracy. The Constitution is totemically invoked by legislators while voter suppression continues in the background. Chillingly altered American flags fly high at rallies that foment hatred and feed a sickening personality cult.
Countless surrogates — from politicians, to public servants, to media figures — enabling the President’s desperate grasps at power under the guise of preserving electoral integrity is merely a further symptom of a disease that has been spreading for years, coming to its most virulent potency in the past months. And unlike the virus that has already killed over a million globally, there is no discernible vaccine around the corner.
But what to make of Amy Coney Barrett? Propelled inelegantly to her post in the last gasps of an incompetent presidency, her tenure risks becoming another stain on the shroud of a dying democracy. Yet she bears an opportunity to rehabilitate public trust in the American judiciary, to remind the country that the judiciary can remain an impartial arbiter of the law, regardless of the political forces influencing its composition. Americans can only hope that Justice Barrett holds true to her words and her oath. But, as the Republican Senators who swore to uphold the Constitution have shown us, oaths, like words, are cheap.
