When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly, Senate Republicans went into panic mode and a political power struggle took precedent over the healthy functioning of our democratic system. Preemptive and unprecedented plans to block any nominations made by President Obama were announced by the Senate Republicans. But before all this started, just days before Scalia’s death, the Supreme Court announced in a 5-4 decision that it would stay executing a decision regarding the appeal made by 29 states that challenged Obama’s climate change agenda. Even by Washington standards, the amount of obstruction to new, much-needed environmentally-oriented regulations, hailing from all branches of government, is an unprecedented and gross perversion of democracy.
Climate change should not be a partisan issue. Climate change does not care about politics or who the new Supreme Court justice will be. Climate change is real and happening at an alarming rate which affects us all, regardless of political affiliations. Yet large corporate entities, mainly in the energy sectors, use their political puppets in every branch of government to thwart progress toward climate mitigation, in order to pursue their private economic agendas. While the influence of political corruption usually reveals itself in the legislative sectors of our government, even the “impartial” judiciary branch is not free from the perverse influence of deep-pocketed energy companies.
This partiality was foreshadowed when the Supreme Court announced its decision, before Scalia’s death, to table an initiative related to the president’s climate change plan, which was adopted at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015. The plan would require each state to come up with their own agenda to reduce carbon emissions, provide clean drinking water for constituents and improve air quality; but now these climate and health safeguards will have to wait even longer, until a new justice has been appointed. It seems Republicans and the conservative justices are continuing to stall the Climate Plan in hopes that a Republican will be elected come November and appoint another conservative to the court, thereby tilting the balance of power toward a rejection of the plan.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of the vacancy on the Supreme Court and of getting a new justice appointed in a timely fashion. Clean air, water and climate action safeguards, which we have fought for decades to secure, are in limbo as we wait for political officials to do their jobs. The Constitution is clear: The president nominates the Supreme Court justices, and the Senate “advise and consents” to the appointment. Science is clear: Global warming is occurring, it’s caused by humans and it is bad. Therefore, the people appointed to represent us should do their jobs.
But in this political power play, in the use of “the election year” as a scapegoat to delay nominating a new Supreme Court justice, our health and the health of the environment have once again been marginalized as profits have once again trumped the people. Those who stand to profit most from the dysfunction in all branches of the government are at it again. The concerned citizens and the environment — the victims of this political ineffectiveness — can exhale a big, defeated, toxic-yellow-air-quality sigh as we hope that one day politics will work for the people, and not for a profit.