NC Policy Watch: “In “Republicans on the Supreme Court are ‘originalist’ until they don’t want to be,” Nichol skillfully exposes the nonsense found in the claim of the U.S. Supreme Court’s right wing that they are defenders of constitutional “originalism” — the idea that they are somehow engaged in doing the business of implementing the desires of the nation’s founders.
As Nichol rightfully points out, despite the claim of these same justices (per Justice Clarence Thomas) that their philosophy is “rooted in the text of the Constitution, as informed by history,” the truth is that they have authored or signed on to numerous opinions that fly in the face of such a concept.
In particular, Nichol holds up the infamous Citizens United ruling, in which the Court’s right wing hatched the destructive notion that corporations have a constitutional right to spend whatever they want to purchase our elections. As Nichol puts it:
The framers didn’t think of money as speech or corporations as people.
Thomas Jefferson notably declared: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to our laws.”
But today’s Republican justices are committed to cash register politics because it’s in the interest of rich people. That’s all that mattered in Citizens United. Never mind “original meaning.”
Nichol highlights similar sophistry in the disastrous Court rulings that struck down gun control laws, affirmative action by the federal government…”