That force is wreaking new havoc against democracy, despite the fact that Trump no longer rules in the White House and that his party does not have a majority in the House of Representatives or in the Senate.
On the Supreme Court, for example, a majority of ultraconservative justices has just reversed Roe v. Wade, one of the most relevant constitutional criteria in the modern history of American justice. In said criterion, in force since 1973, the Court had interpreted that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the right to have an abortion at the federal level. Instead, starting two weeks ago, the authorities of each state of the American Union will be able to decide on the matter.
Such a ruling opens a tremendous constitutional Pandora’s box in at least three ways. First, because it makes evident the fragility of rights when they are not explicitly sanctioned by the Constitution and consequently depend on the correlation of forces between the judges of the highest court. Second, because other criteria established by the Supreme Court and based on the Fourteenth Amendment could also be reversed, for example, those related to racial segregation, the use of contraceptives or same-sex marriage.
And third, because it sends a signal of enormous political importance: the Fourteenth Amendment was one of the so-called “reconstruction amendments”, incorporated into the constitutional text in 1868, which sought to provide citizen rights to all Americans and guarantee their equal protection. after the outcome of the Civil War and the end of slavery. The amendment was heavily litigated by the defeated side, the Confederates, as it transferred to the federal sphere powers and procedures that until then had belonged to the states.
The decision of the Supreme Court, then, goes against already acquired rights, reopens very deep wounds and updates one of the most traumatic episodes of the American past: that of the Civil War. However, the justified scandal that this has caused seems to be distracting attention from another attack that the Trumpist forces are carrying out in the face of 2024: not through the Judiciary, but in the state legislatures.
As political scientist David Pepper has argued in his disturbing book Laboratories of Autocracy (St. Helena Press, 2021), state-level legislatures have become another battering ram against democracy. In the states where the trumpists have majorities, they are carrying out a revolution as silent as it is authoritarian that seeks to demand new requirements to exercise the right to vote, hinder access to the polls and change the model of electoral governance, that is: who counts the votes, how, who monitors the process, who certifies the results, who can challenge them and how.
