Congress, the Supreme Court and the streets are on a collision course.
I have a bad feeling about June. Here’s what’s on the political calendar:
The January 6th Select Committee will be holding six televised hearings, starting Thursday June 9th at 8pm, assuming the leaked information that the Guardian reported is accurate. The bipartisan committee’s findings are likely to be explosive, as they are expected to show that Trump and his MAGA allies planned, promoted and paid for a criminal conspiracy to overturn an election they lost.
It’s rare for us to hear Democrats calling out Republicans so directly — most of the time they seem to hold back in the hopes that they can convince a few supposed “moderates” to join them on legislation (as is happening now in the Senate over gun regulation) — but from all indications these hearings are going to be intense. As well they should be: a criminal conspiracy to overturn a democratic election is about the worst political crime our country has ever faced, and the hearings are bound to raise already-high partisan tempers around the country.
While the January 6th hearings play out in Congress and on the airwaves, the streets of DC are also going to be filling with angry protestors all month.
Three days after the hearings start, on Saturday June 11th, the second March For Our Lives will descend on Washington, with sibling marches in hundreds of other locations around the country. If this march is anywhere as big as the first one in 2018, several hundred thousand people may show up in DC. Many are coming to lobby their members of Congress the week before; there’s also talk that some may stick around afterwards for more insistent forms of political protest.
A lot likely depends on whether the Senate will reach a compromise on new background check legislation in response to the Uvalde massacre or if it deadlocks.
Two days after that, on June 13th, ShutDownDC, a direct action group that recently made waves for street protests in front of Justice Sam Alito’s home, is planning to blockade the streets around the Supreme Court. And then the next Saturday, on June 18th, the day before Juneteenth, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, led by Rev. William Barber, is slated to bring busloads of low-wage workers into DC to demand transformative changes in the economy. More than 342 staging locations are already up and running on Rally.co, a sign that this too may be a huge event.
Sometime in the midst of all of this ferment, the Supreme Court is going to announce its decision in New York State Rifle Association v Bruen, a challenge to a NY law that limits who can carry a concealed handgun in public to people with a heightened need to do so. The Court has already held, in 2008, that a full-blown ban on individual handgun ownership violated the Second Amendment, essentially expanding the right to bear arms way past the “regulated militia” language in the actual amendment to an ”inherent right of self-defense.” Court watchers expect the conservative majority to throw out New York’s law, invalidating similar laws affecting about one-quarter of the US population.
And then most likely at the very end of its current session, in the last days of June, the Court will issue what we all now expect to be a 5–4 ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the nearly fifty year precedent established by Roe v Wade. Hundreds of thousands turned out at nearly spontaneous rallies last month when the draft Dobbs ruling leaked (leading to that march in front of Justice Alito’s home). The protests may be even bigger if the final decision turns out to as harsh and threatening to other privacy-related rights, like the right to contraception and to same-sex marriage, as is feared.
At the same time that mostly liberal-progressive forces rally in Washington and in cities around the country, there are also signs that the backlash against Biden and the left is also intensifying around the country. David Niewert, who has long tracked the “eliminationist right,” reports that violent rhetoric targeting LGBTQ+ people is rising. In Texas, for example, he reports more incidents of transgender youth being physically threatened and stores displaying Pride banners harassed by thugs calling them “pedophiles.” June is Pride Month, a time to celebrate human rights and freedom, but this year those celebrations may also become targets for far-right attacks.
Young people, gun control activists, abortion rights advocates, economic justice organizers all bring passions. They also attract opponents. It’s not hard to see how things could heat up this month. Let’s hope everyone sticks to raising their voices, and not their arms.