Donations spotlight: Take Back the Court Action Fund fights for a Supreme Court that serves the people, not the powerful

Note from the CREDO Mobile team: This February, the Take Back the Court Action Fund is among three amazing groups that will receive a share of our monthly grant. Funding from the CREDO Mobile community will be vital to the nonprofit as it works to inform the public about the danger that the Supreme Court poses to democracy.

 Read this important blog post from Take Back the Court Action Fund, then visit CREDO Donations and cast your vote to help send much-needed grant money to the group to assist its efforts—and the efforts of our other outstanding February grantees.

In 2016, the right-wing movement stole the Supreme Court. In an unprecedented power grab, Mitch McConnell and his Republican cronies refused to hold a vote for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. In doing so, they shrunk the court to eight seats for more than a year. But they weren’t done.

In the fall of 2020, they reversed course entirely and rammed through Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation in record time—even though 63 million people had already cast their ballots in the election that would fire Donald Trump.

With those two insidious moves, Republicans took the Supreme Court hostage, enshrining a right-wing extremist supermajority of six justices, five of whom were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.

And last spring, those right-wing justices—several of whom are reportedly entangled in a massive web of corruption—returned the ultimate favor to the right by declaring that Trump is immune from prosecution for any “official” criminal acts committed while in office.

Republicans stole the Supreme Court with the goal of imposing the dark reality we now live in: a version of America where they call the shots and get a rubber stamp on their most regressive, radical policies and most anti-democratic impulses.

The Supreme Court is stripping us of fundamental rights and freedoms

Take Back the Court Action Fund was established to counter this existential threat to our democracy. We’re fighting to reform and rebalance the court, freeing it from the clutches of a few corrupt oligarchs robbing us of our rights and freedoms and returning control to its rightful place: the hands of the American people.

We are watching the court strip away more and more of our fundamental rights and freedoms each and every year. Already, we’ve seen the court’s radical justices overturn the right to abortion, gut the Voting Rights Act, roll back crucial protections for workers, Black, Latino, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people, hamstring our government’s ability to fight the climate crisis, open the floodgates to more gun violence and effectively anoint Donald Trump king.

Only reforming the court will protect us from its attacks

So what are we doing about it? We’re building a movement to reform and rebalance the Supreme Court.

Our country was founded on a principle of checks and balances, and it’s the job of Congress to check the court’s power. Democratic leaders had a window to solve the problem of our broken court when they held both houses of Congress and the presidency. They could have added four new justices to restore balance to the court and fix what Mitch McConnell broke—but they didn’t step up.

That window for reform has slammed shut for now but not forever. Next time the Democrats take power, they’ll have an opportunity to redeem themselves by reining in this out-of-control court. And we’re making sure they’re ready to do whatever it takes.

We cannot create a future that works for all with an unbalanced and compromised Supreme Court that ignores the will of the people, rolls back our rights and freedoms, and dismantles our democracy piece by piece. Everything we care about—restoring the right to vote, ensuring reproductive freedom, protecting workers, halting our climate emergency, passing new progressive legislation and more—all of it depends on reforming this rogue court and curbing the unprecedented corruption around Trump’s rogue right-wing supermajority.

Together, we can take back the court

This court isn’t going to police itself. The justices embroiled in ethics scandal after ethics scandal are not going to voluntarily check their own power or miraculously wake up and decide to “do the right thing.” And the court’s right-wing supermajority won’t stop its crusade to rule over us like a panel of demigods, stripping away our freedoms and deciding who dies, who lives and how.

So it’s up to us—all of us—to stop them. We’re making sure all Americans and our representatives in Congress know exactly how dire is the threat that this court poses to our lives and futures, and what we can and must do about it.

We’ve all seen the deadly consequences of the Supreme Court’s unchecked power. We’ve seen the devastation that follows just one term. We cannot withstand 40 more years of this court rolling back a century of hard-won progressive advancements.

Taking back the court means having a government that works for us and a court that is accountable to us. Together, we can reclaim our power and rebuild our democracy. Join us at Take Back the Court.