But what makes Shelby County especially egregious is its threadbare legal reasoning, which can't even be called 'constitutional law.' The Constitution unambiguously gives Congress the power to enforce the 15th Amendment. The impact of the decision to reverse a key part of the Voting Rights Act is anti-democratic, allowing numerous illegal voter-suppression schemes to go into effect, and making it much more difficult to stop them. The Roberts Court's evisceration of the most important civil-rights legislation passed since Reconstruction was its lowest moment. But the five absolutely worst Roberts Court decisions are these, in descending order of indefensibility:ġ. There's plenty wrong with Citizens United, as I have argued. But the more important campaign finance decision remains the 1976 case Buckley v. Politicians such as Sanders and Clinton can justifiably use that decision as a synecdoche for all of the restrictions the Court has placed on the government's ability to regulate campaign financing. On the question of the ruling's impact, the actual fallout from Citizens United has probably been overrated. Nevertheless, the constitutional arguments made by the Court had more basis in text and precedent than the Roberts Court's five absolutely worst decisions. Indeed, on the very narrow question presented by the case-whether the federal government could suppress the broadcast of an anti-Hillary Clinton movie- Citizens United was arguably correct to answer 'no.' What makes the decision a bad one is that the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide that issue. On this score, the First Amendment questions at the heart of campaign financing are genuinely difficult. Let's take the first criterion, plausibility. First, how plausible was the legal argument? And second, how negative was the policy impact of the decision? By these measures, Citizens United doesn't quite qualify as the worst work of the Roberts Court. So what were the five worst Roberts Court rulings? This list relies on two criteria.

In fact, Citizens United arguably does not rank in the top five rulings handed down during the Roberts era. But the left's fixation on Citizens United overlooks many Roberts Court decisions that were as bad or even worse.

After all, big money has the potential to disrupt virtually every aspect of the progressive agenda, from environmental regulations to the minimum wage and health care. Not only Senator Elizabeth Warren but Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have consistently railed against the case as a symbol of the corporate takeover of democracy, and so have countless grassroots activists.Īll this makes sense given the extent to which wealthy interests have been permitted to dominate American politics and policy.

FEC ruling is 'one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of our country.' And this is not an instance where Sanders conflicts with the conventional wisdom of the party establishment either. In a by-now familiar applause line, Bernie Sanders told Democrats gathered at the Democratic National Convention last week that the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v.

3 worst supreme court decisions