Anthony Kennedy Completely Destroyed his Legacy
With Justice Anthony Kennedy’s recent announcement that he is resigning from the Supreme Court, any and all good that his tenure on the Court has brought to this country will become a footnote to his tacit endorsement of the current administration’s policies of racism, xenophobia, white exceptionalism, the 0.1%, nationalistic protectionism, media manipulation, the systematic shrinkage of the electorate through disenfranchisement, favoring short term profits over protection of the environment, the criminalization of being poor, and separating babies from their parents that his retirement announcement brings.
Liberals had hopes that Justice Kennedy, oft considered the swing vote on the Supreme Court, would side their way in at least one of the contentious, ideological votes before the Supreme Court this term. When he didn’t side with them in cases concerning the Muslim ban, religious liberty, voting rights, arbitration agreements, corporate liability, and public sector unions in this his last term, Liberals were miffed. However, they still held Kennedy in esteem considering his landmark decision on marriage equality which brought the United States into the modern world ushered in by the Netherland’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001.
However, these recent decisions were potentially foreshadowing his impending retirement. It is hard to ignore the implication that he was simply laying the ground work for the predictable blowback over his departure by intentionally siding with the conservatives this term to give himself the cover story, ‘see nothing will change when I leave because I always side with the conservatives’.
Kennedy announcing his retirement shortly before the midterms also has the appearance of a blatant attempt to shift the midterm momentum to the Republicans. Possibly emboldened by the flagrant, unpunished, and reprehensible behaviors of some current officials, Anthony Kennedy here in his suspiciously timed announcement gives life to the conservative voices in this society to continue tightening their stranglehold on a democracy wanting to progress but being held back by policies tailored to disenfranchise, sideline, imprison, silence, and drown out progressive voices.
However, Liberals should not lament his departure lest they forget that Kennedy was instrumental in this country’s current political state of affairs. He enabled a shrinking, rich, white man, minority to maintain control over Washington with his participation in the Court’s epically poor decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission(2010) where Kennedy infamously wrote in his opinion, “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”
The key phrase here being, “associations of citizens” in which the implication is that corporations are, possibly in some alternate universe, monolithic blocks of like thinking individuals. The reality of course is that corporations are controlled by small groups of extremely rich white men on the board of directors or on Wall Street, and their views do not represent the views of the potentially thousands of diverse employees of the corporation. However, this select few, thanks to Kennedy, now wield the enormous power of writing big checks to campaign for their very elite demographic.
The impact of this decision speaks for itself, and the reverberations will continue until it is overturned or until this democracy crumbles under the weight of the autocrats driven by the allure of unchecked power and the force of human nature.
Kennedy’s tacit endorsement of this administration’s policies and his ushering in the age of the suppression of the middle class voter’s voice over the view of someone with a lot of money completely overshadows anything positive in this man’s legacy. History will not and should not be kind to Anthony Kennedy.
