Republicans plan to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. When installed, she will form a 6-3 majority on the court that represents a small minority of the country.
A Republican president hasn’t won a first term with the popular vote since 1988, but the chaotic nature of Supreme Court appointments plus the anti-democratic nature of the electoral college mean that five of those six justices were appointed by Presidents who lacked popular support.
This problem isn’t limited to the Supreme Court―lower courts are now just as skewed. And our polling shows that voters don’t like the way these arch-conservative courts have been ruling.
Mitch McConnell took control of the Senate in 2014, and immediately erected a blockade on judicial nominations from President Obama. Senators from red states had already been placing holds on nominees over the previous six years, leaving enormous numbers of judicial vacancies at all levels of the Courts when Trump took office in 2017―and he and McConnell went to great lengths to pack those courts full with young, unqualified conservative hard-liners.
Republican judges are positioned to strike down abortion rights, voting rights, and environmental regulations. Republicans can lose every election for the next 50 years and still enact their agenda.
Voters don’t approve of Republican jurisprudence. We want government to be able to regulate greenhouse gas emissions:
And voters don’t want an activist court to strike down state-issued public health measures to contain the coronavirus:
