Conservative US Supreme Court verdicts likely to energise Democrat base

WASHINGTON – A young woman broke down in tears outside the United States Supreme Court on Friday – one of the many protesters upset over the

court’s decision to block President Joe Biden’s election promise

of forgiving student debt.

Americans’ student debt stands at US$1.6 trillion (S$2.2 trillion), affecting a fifth of all adults. According to studies, university graduates owe an average of US$33,500 a year after they leave school.

The President’s plan was to provide as much as US$10,000 to US$20,000 in debt relief for as many as 43 million eligible borrowers,

wiping out more than US$400 billion in debt,

according to an estimate by the New York Federal Reserve.

The court’s decision was a blow to Mr Biden’s agenda – a promise he has failed to keep. Critics say expectations were raised even as many, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, warned that the President did not have the authority to forgive student debt by fiat.

Besides killing student debt forgiveness, another verdict the same day curbed LGBTQ rights. These, and an earlier verdict overturning affirmative action in education, and last year’s ruling reversing longstanding precedent on abortion rights, also give the President and the Democratic Party more electoral ammunition against the Republican Party.

President Biden castigated the verdict. He is fighting one of the most significant legacies of his predecessor Donald Trump – the appointment of three justices to the Supreme Court, giving it a six-member conservative majority on the nine-member Bench.

The verdict on the student loan case was six-three, in line with the ideological split.

It was a central agenda of conservatives, to tilt the court, and one of the most far-reaching. Supreme Court justices serve for life or until they retire.

“It is the three Trump appointments that form the majority in all cases, so you certainly can make a credible case that it’s the Republicans who were responsible,” Professor Glenn Altschuler, an American studies expert at Cornell University, told The Straits Times.

“It shows... Republicans as the bad guys, and that there’s a stark difference” between the two parties, he said.

In a case involving whether creative businesses can refuse to serve LGBTQ+ customers, the court ruled on Friday that an evangelical Christian website designer was within her rights to do so. It cited the US’ First Amendment free speech rights.

That decision was also six-three, delivered by Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump’s appointees.

Liberal justices wrote unusually scathing dissents in both cases. On the student debt case, Justice Elana Kagan wrote that the court had “no business deciding” the case.

On the website designer’s case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “Today, the court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

“This is heartbreaking,” she added.

Meanwhile, the court’s reputation, often higher than that of most administrations, has sunk, partly because of questions over the ethics of two conservative justices.

In one such case, Justice Samuel Alito failed to disclose a 2008 trip on the private jet of Republican mega donor Paul Singer, and did not recuse himself from a case involving Mr Singer’s hedge fund.

According to data from the polling organisation Gallup, the Supreme Court’s reputation among the American public plunged from 62 per cent approval in August 2000 to 40 per cent in 2022.

A November 2022 Pew Research survey showed that 35 per cent of Americans now see the high court as friendly towards religion – nearly double those who said this in a survey conducted in 2019.

This follows several decisions with implications for religion, Pew noted.

These include ending the constitutional right to abortion and leaving the matter to individual states, favouring a high-school football coach who led Christian prayers after games, and allowing public funding for private religious schools.

Earlier last week, the court also

ruled against affirmative action in the education system,

which is a blow to African Americans.

On Friday, Californian Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat, tweeted that the court is “completely out of touch with everyday Americans”.

“Reversing Biden’s student debt forgiveness in the middle of an affordability crisis is a disaster,” he said.

Prof Altschuler said: “This is now the most conservative Supreme Court... in at least 100 years. The ethical violations... confirm every cynical instinct that Americans have – and these days Americans have a lot of cynical instincts – that these... allegedly public servants are feeding at the trough (and) thumbing their noses at American people.”

He added: “There is no question, and we have a tremendous amount of evidence that the (2022 verdict curbing the right to abortion) continues to be the gift that keeps on giving for Democrats. Abortion is an energising issue for Democrats.”

Political opinion pollster John Zogby, of John Zogby Strategies, said: “Just as the nullification of Roe v Wade (the constitutional right to abortion) breathed new life into the Democrats running for office in 2022, this week’s Supreme Court decisions promise several advantages to the President going into 2024.”

He added: “Each decision hit hard a key group Mr Biden needs to be re-elected – LGBTQ voters, young voters with college debt and black voters.

“History tells me they will be energised to vote in 2024.”