An excellent and very clear Vox story and recent history by Matt Yglesias: Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court — and that’s good.
The subtitle continues the explication: It’s time America woke up to the radical right that’s run the Court for years.
Here are three paragraphs under the heading, “The Supreme Court versus Democracy,” which, I think, wham the point, though you really should read the full article. I’ve bolded the key sentence:
From the infamous case of Bush v. Gore to its refusal to look at the problem of partisan gerrymandering to a series of judicial decisions striking down efforts to regulate the campaign finance system (Citizens United is the best known of these, but McConnell v. FEC is probably more important) to the absurd Shelby County v. Holder decision in (which five conservative justices arbitrarily decided that racially motivated voter suppression was no longer a problem), the Supreme Court has spent the better part of 20 years chipping away at American democracy.
The basic worldview is that Congress lacks the power to decide for itself what subjects impact interstate commerce or how to set up regulatory agencies, the agencies themselves lack the power to decide how to enforce the rules, and American citizens lack enforceable rights to have their votes counted. Elected officials are, however, now having a much easier time getting away with accepting bribes.
Putting Kavanaugh on the bench will likely exacerbate these problems. But critically, in most respects, the justice he’s replacing was already very much part of the problem, and anyone Trump might have appointed instead of Kavanaugh would be just as bad. His ascension is not so much an alarming new point of departure as a useful opportunity for people to open their eyes to what’s been happening for a while.
It’s why I’ve termed this the Koch Bros Final Solution to Democracy.