AS PART OF HIS ELOQUENT—IF EVENTUALLY FUTILE—SUMMATION in defense of the wrongly accused Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch, the hero of the film To Kill a Mockingbird, tells the jury to put aside its ingrained cultural and social racism in order to look the plain facts dead in the face:
“Now, gentlemen, in this country our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system. That’s no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality.”
We have spent a year wondering whether or not anyone believes this anymore. Senator Mitch McConnell leaves office with his life’s political mission fulfilled. He remade the federal judiciary in his Symphony, his his . Over the past decade and a half, the court has wrecked reproductive rights, campaign finance regulation, and the prime accomplishment of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Heavily gerrymandered Republican majorities in the state legislatures thereupon leaped in and joined the effort to roll back the federal government past FDR’s New Deal, all the way past his cousin Teddy’s Square Deal. The lower federal courts are now the vehicle by which reactionary ideas and retrograde policies are insinuated into the judiciary and up the conservative legal food chain. This is what Mitch Mc-Connell has achieved. As NBC News pointed out in 2020, when he was majority leader:
