(Reuters) – Much of the U.S. population is on National Day leave on Monday and indulging in traditional backyard barbecues, parades and fireworks amid polarized political life, some even considering democracy in danger.
Conservatives rejoice in string of U.S. Supreme Court victories, landmark rulings ending constitutionality of abortion rights, expanding gun rights and curtailing government authority to regulate emissions from power plants.
Meanwhile, testimonies presented to the House Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 reveal that former President Donald Trump and the violent mob supporting him could have come close to overturning the election. from November 2020.
Now some conservatives say criticism that extremists threaten democracy is overblown, noting that Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress.
However, the concerns are such that Joe Biden has created a commission to study possible reform of the Supreme Court. Laurence Tribe, professor of law at Harvard, was one of the members of this commission and advocates the enlargement of the Court to counter the current conservative trend.
“The chances of us really sinking, as other democracies have, are frighteningly real,” he said.
Charles Fried, a Harvard law colleague who once argued Supreme Court cases for Republican President Ronald Reagan’s administration, favors a different change: term limits that would extend the length of lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court at age 18.
“There are people, and I’m afraid some of them sit on the Supreme Court, who want to abrogate the 20th century,” Charles Fried said.
(Report Daniel Trotta, French version Augustin Turpin, edited by Kate Entringer)