Archival, updated 2018 to reflect Trump’s Supreme Court – In his extraordinary 26 minute history of the Supreme Court Dr. Michael Parenti warned us in 1995 that this partisan, aristocratic institution might one day empower an autocratic president. It seems that time has come and two Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, can push the scales of justice in favor of their politics. Unless there is a groundswell to question and change the legal rules of that institution. Why is so much power being given to 9 unelected, non term limited judges.
Michael Parenti was born into a working class Italian family in East Harlem, New York City. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in political science at Yale in 1962. His academic career was cut short by his dismissal after he was arrested for protesting the US war on Vietnam. Parenti became an independent scholar, lecturer and author. And he remained an activist as well.
Over 20 years ago Parenti already pointed to the role of the court in concentrating wealth in the top 1 percent, and the way in which the Supreme Court expanded the power of corporations and laid the groundwork for what later became the Citizens United ruling of 2009.
And most dangerously, how the Supreme Court began to give power to the president in matters of foreign policy and national security that neither Congress nor the Constitution had granted. Parenti said: “… by Judicial Fiat the President could now do whatever he wanted in the absence of specific legislative prohibitions.”
The Supremely Political Court is part of the series: Democracy What Went Wrong , how the CIA, media, corporations, universities, police and the Supreme Court are threatening democracy and what might be done to meet challenge. The original series was produced by TUC radio in 1995.
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