The conservative remaking of the Supreme Court is the culmination of the GOP’s 80-year war against the New Deal

This excellent piece by @HC_Richardson reminded me of a disturbing article about the Supreme Court and the New Deal I read in 2005. It seemed far fetched at the time, but it provided the outlines of the present in which we now live. That article by @RosenJeffrey offered a deep look into the “Constitution in Exile” movement within conservative legal circles.

The goal of that movement was to roll back the political clock to before 1937, to before the moment when the New Deal welfare state was given full constitutional sanction. Some names from this 2005 article that might sound familiar: John Kyl (who will be shepherding the Kavanaugh confirmation through the Senate), John Roberts, Ed Meese (who made a cameo at the WH this week), the Koch Bros (who almost no one had heard of in 2005), and William Pryor (who was on Trump’s SCOTUS short list last year but lost out to Gorsuch).

The Constitution in Exile movement seemed preposterously ambitious in 2005 — as if they could roll back the entire New Deal and “dismantle the administrative state.” Pshaw! And then Trump won the election, with enthusiastic backing from the Heritage Foundation and messaging custom-designed by Steve Bannon, a man who has stated that his life mission is to “dismantle the administrative state.” The Constitution in Exile movement has arrived…it has chosen the slate of SCOTUS nominees from which Trump has picked, and its avowed devotees are running almost the entire executive branch and have strong footholds in the Senate and House GOP delegations.

The problem they faced then (as they still do today) is that the New Deal state (Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, workers’ rights, etc.) is immensely popular. So electoral politics alone wouldn’t cut it…they would need some serious judicial activism to get this done.

We’re used to seeing the GOP as the handmaiden of corporate interests, but this goes far beyond that. This is not just about getting a favorable shake from regulators, this is about dismantling the entire federal regulatory apparatus. They were playing the long game.

The folks in this radical, right wing legal movement took it as their mission to push the GOP to ignore the political consequences and pursue their judicial strategy aggressively. Cultivating and appointing the “right” sorts of justices was their prime strategy.

Here’s the concluding paragraph of that article. In 2005, the triumph of this bizarre and extreme judicial philosophy seemed improbable, even to its proponents. But they kept their shoulders to the wheel. Sadly, Trump may serve as the angel of history they’d been waiting for.

This radically deregulatory movement has been the “behind the scenes” driver of GOP politics for the past several decades. The 2005 article I’ve been talking about appeared just a few months after Bush announced that he wanted to privatize Social Security. I suspect that was what inspired this article. Where is this kooky idea coming from, the author wondered. Note how the GOP learned its lesson from that disaster. The “privatize SSA” movement went down in flames, and contributed to W’s plummeting popularity. So they went back into hiding for a while and kept plugging away at the judiciary.

Trump is the return of that movement. Regardless of what we think of Trump’s intelligence or political vision, he’s clearly been coopted by the radical deregulators to serve their agenda. This largely explains his cabinet picks, for example. Almost every appointee had expressed their deep hatred for the missions of the agencies they were to head up — Pruitt at EPA, Perry at Energy, Carson at HUD, DeVos at Education, etc.

The Trump administration has in its sites not only the post WWII global order as embodied in NATO and the UN, but also the entire governmental apparatus built up by the New Deal and the Great Society. The dismantling has only begun and there is still a long way to go before it is completed. But we should be clear-eyed about the long-term goal of the people in the GOP who are propping up this doddering President and using him to serve their unpopular agendas.

Trump and most of his #maga supporters hate regulations because, ya know, they just get in the way of “good guys,” honest businessmen like me who just wanna build things without some know-it-all squawking about endangered birds or climate change. Such folks haven’t read Hayek or done Paul Ryan-sized tap-chugs from the Heritage Foundation’s abundant reservoirs of Ayn Rand flavored kool-aid. They just want to be free to make money however they see fit.

But that #maga movement they’ve built has been hitched to a wagon that’s been slowly gaining momentum since Robert Taft first complained about the New Deal, and Goldwater declared independence from the Eisenhower/Rockefeller wing of the GOP. The grand irony, of course, is that these people call themselves the true “conservatives.” Using a racist demagogue to tear down an enormous political edifice that is over 80 years old — somehow I doubt Edmund Burke would recognize that as a sort of “conservatism” he’d endorse.