Fighting Back Against a Reactionary Court

Fighting Back Against a Reactionary Court

After Dobbs, Linda Hirshman joins The Time of Monsters to discuss the legal battles to come.

Jeet Heer
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The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 supermajority of Republican-appointed justices, is on a rampage. On Friday, they extinguished the constitutional right to reproductive freedom. Then on Monday, they eased restrictions on teachers and coaches leading students in prayer at public schools.

In his majority statement in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that ended abortion rights, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made a curiously two-faced statement about future rights: He said that he thought previous court rulings on birth control, marriage equality, and gay rights broadly were badly decided. But he also offered assurances that they would not be touched since they were less serious issues than abortion.

Should Alito be trusted? The fact that conservative justices previously made misleading statements about respecting precedent on abortion suggests not.

This week I talk to Linda Hirshman, whom I often describe as the Cassandra of the American left because she has been warning of this moment for decades. Linda is an astute analyst of conservative judicial extremism, whose work can be found here. We talk about where the court is going next and also radical (but also perfectly doable) actions the Democrats can take to stop the evisceration of basic constitutional rights.

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As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

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Jeet Heer Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


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