Let’s consider the Supreme Court’s radical right Gang of Five. They’re trying to take America back to 1953 or so, if not earlier, ignoring what the majority of Americans want.

Three of them (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett) are the only three justices in US history who were both (1) selected by a president (D____ T____) who lost the popular vote and (2) approved by a group of senators who represented less than 50% of American voters. (That particular president took office only because the national news media was fixated on the email practices of the Democratic candidate and the director of the FBI broke his agency’s own rules by releasing “news” that harmed the Democrat a few days before the election.)

One (Gorsuch) took his seat on the Court after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked consideration of Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for a record 293 days, saying the upcoming election precluded any talk of a nominee.

McConnell got another one of them onto the Court (Coney Barrett) when he reversed the “rule” he’d invented for Garland. She was nominated by T____  just 38 days before the 2020 election (when votes were already being cast) — another record.

The fourth member of the Gang of Five (Alito) was nominated by a president (George W. Bush) who lost the popular vote the first time he ran. He might have also lost the Electoral College if the five Republicans on the Supreme Court had allowed Florida to keep counting votes (just think, President Gore would have meant leadership on the climate crisis and no Iraq war).

Alito is the author of the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which he called an “egregiously bad” decision. He apparently came to that conclusion after his 2006 Senate hearing, during which he told the US Senate that he’d look at abortion with an “open mind”.

The fifth justice (Thomas, nominated by George. H. W. Bush) ascended to the Court after lying to the US Senate about his bad behavior (the senators didn’t believe Anita Hill). He was the first Supreme Court justice approved by senators from states representing less than half the country. Although his wife openly supported the January 6th insurrection, he proceeded to cast the only vote in favor of keeping insurrection-related emails secret.

All five of the Gang are Catholics, as is the sixth Republican on the Court (Chief Justice Roberts, the second justice chosen by Bush #2). None of them told the Senate they would overturn Roe v. Wade if given the chance.

Meanwhile, the Republican justices have been making our politics less democratic, less representative of the nation as a whole, by allowing more money into politics, weakening the Voting Rights Act and refusing to do anything about the rampant gerrymandering of congressional districts. All of this has made it less likely Democrats will be elected and much less likely that conservative institutions like the Court, the Senate and the Electoral College will ever be made more responsive to public opinion.

In other words, we’re screwed.

The American journalist Alex Pareene explains why, furthermore, electing more Democrats might not make much difference:

One of the more consequential contradictions of the Democratic Party is that the vast majority of its staffers, consultants, elected officials, and media avatars, along with a substantial portion of its electoral base, are institutionalists. They believe, broadly, in The System. The System worked for them, and if The System’s outputs are bad, it is because we need more of the right sort of people to join or be elected to enter The System. . . .

Institutionalists, in my experience, have trouble reaching an anti-system person, because they think being against The System is an inherently adolescent and silly mindset. But believing in things like “the integrity of the Supreme Court” has proven to be, I think, much sillier, and much more childish.

In the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency a lot of very intelligent people tried to come up with ideas for how to change the Supreme Court, which is poised to spend years eroding the regulatory state and chipping away at civil rights. Expand it, perhaps. Or marginalize it. President Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, formed a commission of legal scholars—from across the ideological spectrum, of course—to investigate what ought to be done about it. They failed to come up with any answers. “Lawmakers,” the commission wrote, “should be cautious about any reform that seems aimed at the substance of Court decisions or grounded in interpretations of the Constitution over which there is great disagreement in our political life.” You might be mad at the Court because of the decisions it produces, but it’s essential that everyone still trusts the processes that led to them.

This was a white flag. I think some people in the White House have some sick hope that the end of Roe will galvanize the midterm electorate. Something like that may indeed happen. But if they wish to understand why the president has been bleeding youth support for the last year they should try to imagine these young people (and “young”, at this point, has expanded to like 45) not as the annoying and hyper-engaged freaks they see on Twitter every day, but as ones they don’t see anywhere, because, having been urged to pay furious attention by people in the party, they discovered that those people had absolutely no realistic plans to overcome entrenched, systemic obstacles to progress. . . . 

The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch.

Unquote.