![]() ![]() The workers, meanwhile, are unlikely to sue because the cost of hiring a lawyer will exceed the $1,000 in losses. If a company refuses to pay a thousand of its workers $1,000 in wages, for example, the company walks away with a cool $1 million. This decision matters because it effectively grants impunity to companies that cheat many people out of a relatively small sum of money. Concepcion reached this holding, moreover, despite the fact that the Federal Arbitration Act says nothing whatsoever about class actions. These individuals were shunted into a privatized arbitration system that is more likely to rule in favor of corporate parties than real courts, and that typically awards less money to plaintiffs who do prevail.Ĭoncepcion held that forced arbitration agreements may also ban class actions - a mechanism that allows many people who were injured by the same company to join together in a single lawsuit against that company. Concepcion (2011)īeginning in the 1980s, the Supreme Court started to expand the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 - a statute enacted to allow “ merchants with relatively equal bargaining power” to agree to resolve disputes through arbitration - to allow businesses to force workers and consumers to sign away their right to sue as a condition of doing business with that company. Under Citizens United’s definition of “corruption,” the wealthy may spend lavishly to elect candidates of their choice so long as they do not explicitly exchange “dollars for political favors.”Ĭampaign spending by non-campaign groups in the first presidential election year after Citizens United “rose 245 percent in the presidential election, by 662 percent in House races, and by 1,338 percent in Senate races.” Forced arbitration - AT&T v. Citizens United redefined the word “corruption” so narrowly as to render it meaningless. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court recognized that lawmakers must have some power to fight “corruption and the appearance of corruption” by regulating money in politics. This trend is likely to accelerate in the coming decade. The Supreme Court spent the 2010s undercutting voting rights, weakening protections for workers and consumers, and granting bold new rights to Republican constituencies. It is a list about how Republican justices are likely to wield their power in an age of legislative dysfunction, and it offers a warning to Democrats. This is a list about the Supreme Court’s recent past, but it is not a nostalgic one. University of Texas (2016), did not make the list. Hellerstedt (2016) or the affirmative action decision in Fisher v. Decisions that are unlikely to survive under the Court’s current conservative majority, such as the abortion rights decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. For the most part, these cases represent important and ongoing trends in the Court’s decisions. Now that both parties understand this dynamic, congressional dysfunction is likely to be America’s new normal, which means that the Supreme Court will exercise more and more unchecked power.Īnd what has our increasingly conservative Supreme Court done with that power?īelow are nine cases that defined the past decade of American law. As Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell put it in 2010, when legislation is bipartisan, that tends “to convey to the public that this is okay, they must have figured it out.” For that reason, it was “absolutely critical” that every Republican vote against Obama’s biggest achievement. The result is that the opposition party has every incentive to sabotage governance - because voters will tend to reward them for that sabotage. As President Obama explained in a 2014 press conference, “people are going to ask for greater accountability and more responsibility from me than from anybody else in this town.” Worse, the party that controls the White House tends to bear the blame for a dysfunctional Congress, even when the opposition party creates that dysfunction. Enacting significant legislation typically requires bipartisan cooperation, which means that either party can shut down progress simply by refusing to cooperate. The 2010s revealed that America’s constitutional system is profoundly broken. (Hasen defines the term “override” broadly to include acts of Congress that “overturned, reversed, or modified a Supreme Court statutory interpretation holding.”)Īs Congress has become more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court’s ruling has increasingly become the final word in American governance. ![]() If you want to understand what the Supreme Court became in the past decade, consider a 2012 study by University of California Irvine law professor Rick Hasen.īetween 19, Hasen found that Congress enacted “an average of twelve overrides of Supreme Court cases in each two-year Congressional term.” Between 20, by contrast, the number of overrides dwindled to a mere 2.8 per two-year term. ![]()
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