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George Soros has devoted his life and wealth to undermining the economies and stability of western democracies, and he is upset. He says recent Supreme Court decisions to restore the ability of the public and their elected representatives to govern themselves is an attack on democracy by Trump’s far right extremists, and that it has Americans “alarmed.”
“US Democracy Under Concerted Attack
Jul 4, 2022 GEORGE SOROS
The American public has been alarmed and aroused by the US Supreme Court’s growing extremism. But voters need to recognize the Court’s radical majority for what it is: part of a carefully laid plan to turn the US into a repressive regime.
NEW YORK – The United States has been a constantly evolving democracy ever since it was founded in 1776, but its survival as a democracy is now gravely endangered. A set of loosely interconnected developments at home and abroad is responsible for this crisis.
From abroad, the US is threatened by repressive regimes led by Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia who want to impose an autocratic form of government on the world.
But the threat to the US from the domestic enemies of democracy is even greater. They include the current Supreme Court, which is dominated by far-right extremists, and Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which placed those extremists on the Court.
What qualifies the majority of the Court as extremists? It is not merely their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that recognized a woman’s right to choose whether to give birth. What qualifies them as extremists is the arguments they used to justify their decision and the indications they gave of how far they might be willing to go in carrying out those arguments.
Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the majority opinion, based his ruling on the assertion that the Fourteenth Amendment protects only those rights that were generally recognized in 1868, when the amendment was ratified. But this argument endangers many other rights that have been recognized since then, among them the right to contraception, same-sex marriage, and LGBTQ rights.
Carried to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning could even allow states to ban inter-racial marriage, as some did until 1967. It is also clear that this Court intends to mount a frontal attack on the executive branch. One of the most consequential rulings of the Court’s just-completed term denied the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations needed to combat climate change.
US Democracy Under Concerted Attack by George Soros – Project Syndicate
In 1998, George Soros said he recognized the great evil, but felt no guilt helping Nazis confiscate property from other Jews.
