On The Supreme Court's Constitutional Vandalism In Service Of Inherited Wealth [View all]

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/23/on-the-supreme-courts-constitutional-vandalism-in-service-of-inherited-wealth/

... Peter Shane's timeline makes the con obvious. This “ancient constitutional wisdom” mysteriously emerged in the 1980s—Shane notes Roberts was clerking for Rehnquist when Reagan won in 1980, then joined the administration that accelerated this theory’s mainstreaming alongside the founding of the Federalist Society.
But why did American intergenerational wealth suddenly need a constitutional theory that could dismantle regulatory agencies without the messy business of democratic politics?

Simple: the New Deal had created institutions that could actually constrain oligarchic power—agencies that could regulate business, tax wealth, and impose democratic accountability on concentrated capital. These programs remained politically popular, making them difficult to eliminate through normal democratic processes. So oligarchs funded a decades-long legal project to declare them constitutionally illegitimate instead.

“Unitary Executive Theory” is the solution: if the president must have absolute control over all executive functions, then independent regulatory agencies become unconstitutional by definition. If Congress cannot protect agency officials from presidential firing, then democratic constraints on oligarchic power become structurally impossible. The theory isn’t derived from constitutional text or historical understanding—it’s reverse-engineered from the political goal of eliminating democratic accountability. Shane’s documentation reveals how Roberts has systematically implemented this oligarchic wish list while maintaining the fiction of constitutional principle. Presidential immunity, unlimited firing power, subordinated Congress—each decision applies whatever interpretive framework serves the ultimate goal of making New Deal-style democratic constraints constitutionally impossible...

As Shane concludes, Trump’s authoritarian presidency “is not a distortion of the Roberts Court’s theory of the presidency; it is the Court’s theory of the presidency, come to life.” But Trump isn’t the ultimate beneficiary—he’s just the current vehicle for implementing a constitutional framework designed to make democratic constraints on oligarchic power permanently impossible...

The tragedy isn’t just that American democracy is being systematically dismantled by people who swore to protect it. The tragedy is that future generations will inherit the legal precedents created by this exercise in constitutional fraud, long after the oligarchs who commissioned it have achieved their goal of making democratic accountability constitutionally impossible...The check has been written. The Constitution has been cashed. And John Roberts has provided the signature that made it all legally binding on behalf of oligarchs who decided that eliminating democratic constraints was easier than living with them.
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The Roberts MAGA SCOTUS has put at least one future American generation in bondage to anti-democracy oligarchs.
The next Democratic president must lead the way in reforming the SCOTUS and the federal judicial enforcement system.