Supreme inequality
Supreme inequality
The high court has been siding with the rich against the poor since Nixon
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/08/high-court-has-been-siding-with-rich-against-poor-since-nixon/?arc404=true
Nearly 50 years ago, Lewis Powell, a big-firm lawyer in Richmond, had a dream: What if American business took over the then-liberal Supreme Court and turned it into a defender of capitalism and large corporations? Powell set out his ideas in the summer of 1971 in a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with a bombastic title: “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” Within months, President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the court, and he helped bring about the pro-corporate transformation he had called for in his memo.
Powell could hardly have predicted just how much success his vision would have over the next half-century, in almost every area of the law. The Supreme Court would repeatedly rule in favor of corporations and the rich, and against the middle class and the poor — undermining unions, paving the way for lower taxes and generally playing an underappreciated role in reshaping the economy in ways that hurt working people. Democratic presidential candidates and the media generally attribute growing inequality to policies adopted by Congress and presidents, and to larger forces like automation, but the Supreme Court deserves a sizable share of the blame.
By the numbers, the transition in the court’s position on business-related issues has been dramatic. One study, from 2009, found that businesses won 28 percent of their cases before the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren (over the period 1953 to 1969) but 64 percent under the current court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Another found that Justice Samuel Alito and Roberts are the No. 1 and No. 2 most pro-business justices, respectively, to serve since 1946.
The court’s past half-century of favoring the rich and powerful coincides almost exactly with the period when the richest Americans have left the rest of the nation behind. The “World Inequality Report 2018,” produced by Thomas Piketty and other economists — the most recent available — identified two chief drivers of economic inequality in the United States: unequal educational opportunity and an increasingly regressive tax system. The modern court has contributed greatly to both.
The court’s role as a force for inequality started a few years before the Powell memo — in 1969, when Nixon became president. Nixon shared the business community’s skepticism toward the Warren court, and he campaigned on a promise to change it. That court had spent the past 15 years promoting civil rights, starting with Brown v. Board of Education, and expanding the rights of poor Americans, with rulings like Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, a 1966 decision striking down poll taxes. In Nixon’s first three years in office, he appointed four justices, one of the fastest rates of turnover in history. The new members — Warren Burger (the new chief justice), Harry Blackmun, William Rehnquist and Powell — were more sympathetic to big business than their predecessors.
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