POOJAH GEHI: Kavanaugh – from what I know of him is he went to Yale and he’s pretty conservative. He hasn’t outright said that he wants to overturn abortion, but he’s ruled quite a few times in support of the government creating barriers to access to abortion. He’s not good on voter rights. He’s not good on LGBT issues. He’s pretty consistently originalist or constructionalist, which is really, I think, shorthand for interpreting the original intent that the framers had when they created the Constitution, right? Which as we know from history really breaks down around upholding white supremacy and capitalism in particular, property interests with this specific lens towards prioritizing corporate interests over personhood.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Tell us about how important this moment is when Donald Trump and the Republican party will be pushing to confirm a new Supreme Court justice for a lifetime appointment. What’s at stake in your mind in terms of this pivotal seat on the Court?
POOJAH GEHI: Well, we all know Justice Kennedy was the swing vote for the past many, many, many years and we’re going to see very important social justice cases coming to the Supreme Court. We’ve already seen a ton of cases that have been ruled really badly around immigration, the unions, voting rights, etc. Anything, you know, we at the National Lawyers Guild know that the judicial system is not actually a tool that’s going to create meaningful social change that we want to see in the world, but we also know that this nominee has the potential and likelihood of creating (what’s) really, really intensely harmful. A lot it’s going to impact people and of course people who are going to be most impacted are people who are most vulnerable – poor people, people of color, immigrants, people in prison and so on.
BETWEEN THE LINES: I did want to ask you, when it comes to Roe v. Wade and the idea of Supreme Court precedent and justices who might be confirmed to the court overturning that precedent, how difficult a task is that for the court to turn that around given it’s been standard law here in the United States for so long?
POOJAH GEHI: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, for sure. And I think it’s interesting in listening to the interviews because all of the nominees say, you know, they say they will enforce precedent. They want to enforce precedent and are continuing enforcing precedent and we know that that is of course not necessarily true because it falls an ideological lines. But also the access to abortion has been slowly being chipped away, for quite a long time for like the last decade. Both on the federal level, but certainly on the state level. And so I think that we’re going to see more and more barriers to abortion before it gets overturned. But I mean, I do think it’s definitely an urgent risk right now and you know, like Trump ran on the platform thing that he was going to overturn Roe v Wade and I do think the actual process of hearing all the case law and litigating it is gonna take some time.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Conservative justices on the Supreme Court seemed to be working towards undoing or unraveling key elements of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, as well as major civil rights legislation through the years and most recently the Voting Rights Act where they’ve succeeded in gutting that particular provision passed by Congress. Tell us about your concerns about the attacks on the New Deal and civil rights here.
POOJAH GEHI: Oh, that’s absolutely true. The conservative court, along with Donald Trump, seems to be primarily concerned with prioritizing corporations over people, right, over the interests of people. And then also rolling back regulations that have been put in place to support government tax for a really long time. And I think this is where the parallel with libertarianism comes into place. It’s like a move against government involvement and towards libertarianism, which people are interpreting as religious liberty, gun rights, freedom of speech, which has been interestingly used in a way that we on the left have not used freedom of speech in the past. Right, but I think it’s very, very strategically undoing the New Deal for sure.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Given those programs are so popular, what’s the likely response from a country that is used to Social Security and Medicare and more recently used to insurance companies not being able to deny people coverage for pre-existing medical conditions that certainly going to affect a large swath of people, including Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Everybody.
POOJAH GEHI: I would say now is the moment that we need to be in the streets doing civil disobedience, but also really stockpiling resources, being able to – if we can – stockpile contraception, stockpile hormones for trans people, stockpile all these things that we don’t know that we’re going to have access to in a short amount of time.
