Photo by Jackie Hope on Unsplash
The Supreme Court has been on a partisan, right-wing rampage lately, and the results for everyone from migrants to gun-crime victims to voters swamped by corporate dark money in campaigns are disastrous. On June 25, the high court let Trump end temporary protections for Syrian and Haitian migrants, ruled that migrants couldn’t apply for asylum from Mexico, blocked thousands of suits charging the Roundup weed-killer with causing cancer and invalidated limits on public gun-carrying in Hawaii – and that was just in one day!
For the environmentally and health-minded, the Roundup decision is catastrophic. According to the Washington Post June 25, the seven-person judicial majority “ruled Monsanto was not required to offer a warning because the Environmental Protection Agency holds that Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is not a cancer risk.” Tell that to the Lebanese people coated in glyphosate (and white phosphorus) by Israel; I’m sure it’ll reassure them. Not. The high court may have okayed cancer-causing Roundup’s marketing “as safe to spray in a T-shirt and shorts,” as one plaintiff’s attorney derisively put it, but only Israel sprays it more promiscuously, directly onto people, and the purpose is, quite explicitly, to kill human beings. The IDF ain’t concerned about rooting out dandelions in South Lebanon.
The Roundup plaintiff, John Durnell, had won a $1.25 million award from Monsanto, owned by Bayer, delivered by a Missouri jury in 2023. Durnell claimed Roundup caused his blood cancer. Though the EPA has not found the key Roundup ingredient, glyphosate, carcinogenic, in 2015 an agency affiliated with the World Health Organization did, saying it was “probably carcinogenic to humans,” and in particular linked a specific blood cancer – the sort Durnell contracted – to the chemical. “The finding,” per WaPo, “also led to more than 100,000 people with cancer…filing lawsuits against Monsanto…Bayer has spent about $11 billion on settlements to date, but thousands of cases remain open.”
Many of those cases are now kaput, null and void, finito, because “Monsanto asked the Supreme Court to immunize it from nonfederal lawsuits,” which the Supremes promptly did. So if you got cancer for Roundup and filed your case in a state court, and can’t file in a federal court, which is often the case, it’s curtains for you. “Some farm workers groups, cancer prevention organizations and environmentalists…say blocking state suits will remove one of the only means people with cancer have to get recompense.” Recompense? Ha, ha! Because hey, this is America, baby, where corporations rule the roost and people are free to expose themselves to fatal herbicides whenever they weed their gardens!
Indeed, the Roundup decision flashes a green light at corporate polluters everywhere whose chemical products sicken the public. As Robert Hunziker led his article in the June 25 CounterPunch: “MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) just got a poke in the eye as the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed avenues for plaintiff cases against chemical giant Bayer.” Is this how the final word of justice should be spoken? In favor of those who poison multitudes? It’s enough to make you think the high court should be curbed and that for starters, the 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison should be jettisoned, since it’s the abortion its critics long claimed. Because clearly that decision, which lets the court overturn congressional legislation, is worse than what the court does to executive agencies, and both, in turn, look like huge liabilities given the high court’s arrogance regarding state and federal courts. In short, to zero in on the matter at hand, where public health is concerned, the supreme course is more lethal than insecticide.
But at least on June 30 the Supremes didn’t abolish birthright citizenship. Trump tried to ban it. Only justices (sic) Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented, because they evidently view babies born in the U.S. of undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents as unworthy of U.S. citizenship.
This court also struck a blow in favor of gun murders June 25. As the Post wrote: “The decision is the latest by the conservative majority to loosen firearms restrictions in recent terms.” The article clarifies that this ruling invalidates a Hawaii “statute that requires gun owners to get consent to carry a firearm onto private property open to the public…The decision could open the door to challenges to similar laws in New York, New Jersey and Maryland.” The likely upshot is, of course, more gun deaths. But “Justice” Alito and his rabidly rightist confreres are not concerned about that. All they worry about is letting as many people carry guns wherever they want as often as they want. A policy, as far as I can see, worthy of the clinically insane, which includes the NRA. Proof is that lower courts frequently rule in favor of gun sanity – only to have those rulings overturned by the highest kangaroo court in the land.
No matter that many gun control laws emanate from public outrage and grief over the slaughter of school children by psychotics with semiautomatic weapons, as happened at Uvalde, Texas in 2022 – 19 students, two teachers killed, 17 others wounded; Parkland, Florida in 2018 – 17 people killed, 17 injured; Nashville, Tennessee 2023 – three students and three staff members shot and killed; Santa Fe, Texas 2018 – eight students, two teachers killed, 13 wounded; Winder, Georgia 2024 – two students, two teachers killed, seven injured; East Lansing, Michigan 2023 – three students killed, five injured. And those are just the bloodiest of the child sacrifices on the gun-worshipping altar of Moloch, an altar blessed and indeed partly constructed by a fanatical supreme court.
As for ending the temporary protections for Syrian and Haitian migrants while forbidding asylum applications from Mexico – let’s call it the non-white ethnic-cleansing ruling – that obsessive nativism is just all in a day’s work for this court. No matter that many people begging for asylum are Central Americans devastated by U.S. capital’s plunder and tyranny in their homelands. What are these people supposed to do? Go back to Tegucigalpa and starve, because there’s no way to construct a decent life under the thumb of the rapacious Empire to the north? That’s the answer from a high court copacetic with Trump’s tireless demagoguery on this issue. And clearly anyone with notions of basic human fairness on asylum is considered by the Trump hordes, including the Supremes, to be a bleeding-heart liberal or worse – a traitor. For that, there’s treason on this issue long ago entered the far right’s lingua franca: anyone opposed to letting MAGA nativism rip is considered a traitor. And it’s no mystery what true, red-blooded Amuricans do to traitors.
Meanwhile, there are a lonely, intrepid few in Congress who fight back, like Rashida Tlaib with her Ban Warehouse Detention Act, thanks to which, she announced in a letter to supporters, “the Trump administration is backing off its plan to expand ICE detention centers into warehouses across the country.” On this subject, Tlaib famously insisted, “We do not want ICE cages in our communities.” She also announced that “Trump recently appointed a former executive from private prison corporation GEO Group to be the new acting director of ICE,” which caused her to vow to fight “back against ICE’s terror campaign and detention centers’ inhumane conditions, while continuing to demand Congress abolish ICE and expand pathways to citizenship.”
Such humanity is light-years ahead of the dehumanizing caricatures of migrants bandied about by Trump, MAGA, and reinforced by a Supreme Court that’s sickeningly sympathetic to this callousness. What gets lost in the demagogic gallimaufry is that real people’s, often children’s, lives are turned upside-down, ruined or even ended by far-right policies – policies this Supreme Court falls all over itself to enshrine into law. A more nauseating spectacle is hard to imagine.
And yet, just a few days later, it came: on June 30, the high court kicked away caps on political campaign spending. As if its atrocious Citizens United decision years ago hadn’t done enough damage – now this. Political parties can now pay for campaign expenses. Previous statutory caps – vamoose! Which only helps parties with loads of money, namely the duopoly. So with this latest campaign finance abuse masquerading as a decision, the high court cements in place uni-party hegemony in American politics. For the majority of citizens disgusted with the Dems and GOP – welcome to summer 2026. The Supremes just tried to ensure that your voice will not be heard.
The post Trump’s Supreme Court: A Rightist Juggernaut appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.