2 Reasons to Vote for Kamala Harris

The Democratic party has put progressive voters in a monumentally horrible position: Ignore the fact that the U.S. is helping facilitate the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians, or help elect Donald Trump and allow the GOP to enact a national abortion ban.

To some people, the answer is to stop voting for Democrats, believing that they can “punish” the party into policy change. But the stakes are so much higher than in 2016, or even 2020, and the consequences of a possible second Trump presidency go far beyond federal abortion restrictions. Some voters might imagine a world where leaders like Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer move further left if they lose in November. But forget party elites: Millions of everyday Americans will be punished if Trump wins, and they’re the same people whose rights are constantly under attack at the Supreme Court.

Since the Supreme Court tilted to a 6-3 conservative supermajority with three Trump justices, it overturned Roe v. Wade, dramatically expanded gun rights, unraveled environmental regulations, blocked student debt relief, gutted anti-discrimination laws, effectively declared that presidents are kings, gave itself more power to undo laws passed by Congress, and much, much more.

The next president could make multiple Supreme Court appointments, and if it’s Trump, that could ensure a conservative court for decades to come. Voting for Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t just a vote to protect abortion rights or sustain democracy, it’s a moral choice to keep the court in check. (To the objectivity police reading this: Yes, this is an essay in which I’m arguing that a national abortion ban is bad. I admit to being biased on the subject of forced pregnancy and childbirth.)

If people thought recent Supreme Court rulings were bad, conservatives are nowhere near satisfied. At risk are precedents protecting the right to marriage equality, same-sex intimacy, and even the ability to use birth control. The court could uphold laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, which clears the way to ban care for transgender adults. Trump’s plan for militarized mass deportations, which could sweep up even legal immigrants, would no doubt land at the Supreme Court. And, of course, the crackpot legal theory of fetal personhood could imperil in-vitro fertilization and overturn state abortion ballot measures.

If Trump wins, it’s all but certain that both Justice Clarence Thomas, 76, and Justice Samuel Alito, 74, will retire and be replaced with younger, even more strident versions of themselves. Republicans are already very excited about the prospect of Trump appointing more than half of the court, which “no president has done since Franklin D. Roosevelt,” according to NBC News. Roosevelt served three terms, but Trump could achieve it in just two.

While the 6-3 majority wouldn’t change, a court with five GOP justices ages 60 or under could hold that supermajority for another 25 years, at a minimum. And if a Democratic appointee dies under Trump, we could see a 7-2 court.

.@StrictScrutiny_ has been saying this for months. If TFG wins, Alito and Thomas are likely to step down… and will be replaced by much younger movement conservatives. And this 6-3 super-majority will endure for another generation.

Those are the stakes. https://t.co/BdCN8aBE79

— Melissa Murray (@ProfMMurray on Threads 🧵) (@ProfMMurray) August 1, 2024

Voting for Harris can blunt these harms. If even one Republican appointee departs the bench during a Harris administration, the court could revert to a 5-4 GOP majority—still bad, but the median justice would no longer be Brett fucking Kavanaugh. If two leave, there could be a 5-4 Democratic majority. Harris could serve two terms and for, uh, reference, Justice Antonin Scalia died at age 79. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87, but women do typically live longer.)

Yes, there would need to be a Democratic-controlled Senate for Harris to make SCOTUS appointments in the mold of Sonia Sotomayor or Ketanji Brown Jackson. That prospect looks unlikely this election cycle, unless Texas Rep. Colin Allred pulls out a huge upset over Sen. Ted Cruz, or Nebraska Independent candidate Dan Osborn knocks off Sen. Deb Fischer. But if Republicans take control of the chamber and choose to leave one or more Supreme Court seats open—like they did in 2016 after Scalia’s death—it will only underscore that the GOP is treating the court as a political body and it must be reformed. So it could take until 2026 to regain control of the Senate and pass badly needed court reform. (For a dash of hope, look at this visionary bill from Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden.)

Voting for Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t just a vote to protect abortion rights or sustain democracy, it’s a moral choice to keep the court in check.

I acknowledge that electing Harris doesn’t totally solve the threat to abortion rights: There’s still a chance that Thomas and Alito hang on long enough under a Harris presidency to hear a case about fetal personhood or the Comstock Act, where they could vote to uphold national abortion restrictions—or even a ban. But the chances of a national ban are much lower than if Trump wins and his administration enacts one itself (without Congress), via the Project 2025 playbook. 

Plus, Trump’s potential nominees wouldn’t just be younger, they’d likely be more unhinged than the Justices he seated in his first term. Take the example of Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a former Thomas clerk who took his judicial oath inside billionaire Harlan Crow’s library. Ho said anti-abortion doctors had standing to sue over the abortion drug mifepristone last year because such physicians “delight” in working with their “unborn patients” and experience an “aesthetic injury” when they’re aborted. Ho, 51, was already on Trump’s shortlist of potential nominees in 2020.

Trump’s potential re-election would also be disastrous for nominations at the lower courts, which feed cases up to SCOTUS. Just think of Matthew Kacsmaryk, the anti-abortion-lawyer-turned-judge who tried to revoke FDA approval of the abortion drug mifepristone in a horseshit case. Kacsmaryk said he used the phrase “unborn humans” in his ruling because, he claimed, it’s “unscientific” to use “fetus” as a catchall since that word refers to a specific gestational stage of pregnancy. (He likely just wanted to use personhood language.) Or Aileen Cannon, a district judge for the Southern District of Florida, who was just 39 and deeply inexperienced when Trump nominated her in 2020. In September, she tried to throw out Trump’s classified documents case. Frankly, there’s not much that would stop Trump from nominating Kacsmaryk or Cannon to the Supreme Court if he wins again.

In May at the NRA’s annual meeting, Trump recounted a conversation with his aides about judicial appointments. He had suggested nominating a lawyer friend pushing 70 to be a district judge. “We like people in their thirties so they’re there for 50 years or 40 years,” Trump said they told him. “And as soon as they said that I realized, yeah, they’re exactly right.”

One of the main stories of this election has centered around the more than 300,000 Michiganders of Middle Eastern or North African descent and their understandable pleas for the Democratic nominee to earn their votes by halting shipments of weapons that are killing their families.

Since becoming the nominee in late July, Harris has failed to do the bare minimum on Gaza, like pledging that, if elected, she’d enforce existing U.S. law prohibiting support of foreign security forces accused of human rights violations. (It’s called the Leahy Law and its namesake, former Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, said in May that it should finally be applied to Israel.) Harris failed to have a single Palestinian-American speaker at the Democratic National Convention, after at least seven Republicans spoke. She also failed to meet with Palestinian-American families in Michigan who lost loved ones to bombs supplied by the U.S. Having faced almost zero consequences from its most powerful ally, the Israeli government is now also bombing southern Lebanon. 

These failures are heartbreaking, and the suffering we’re watching online in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon is horrific. It’s especially disappointing from a candidate who has centered her campaign on reproductive harms to women and pregnant people given that Israel’s war in Gaza has led to higher rates of miscarriage and maternal and infant mortality.

Still, when the Uncommitted National Movement announced in September that it would not endorse Harris, it urged people not to vote for third-party candidates, or for Trump. The group’s leaders said in a statement that Trump’s “agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing” and that “third party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given our country’s broken electoral college system.” Uncommitted co-founder Abbas Alawieh, who is Lebanese-American and was an “uncommitted” DNC delegate for Michigan, is himself voting for Harris.

I can understand why some Arab-Americans, Muslims, and their families cannot vote for Harris, and I’m not asking them to do so. But if you are white, straight, and cisgender like I am, it is arguably cruel to vote in a way that allows further subjugation of marginalized people in this country. Helping Trump get elected won’t stop the genocide in Gaza, but it will harm untold numbers of Americans in entirely predictable ways. If you’re reading this, you can’t claim you didn’t know about Trump’s oppressive, autocratic plans and how the Supreme Court will back them at every turn. 

I’ve seen a lot of fellow New Yorkers say online that they won’t vote for Harris. But leaving the top of the ticket blank or voting for a third-party candidate is a very different calculation for people in New York or California. They have the privilege of making a protest vote that’s extremely unlikely to harm their friends, neighbors, or coworkers because the Democratic nominee will almost certainly win their state. 

It’s people living in seven swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—who will actually decide this election. Many of them know that their votes have outsized importance due to the archaic Electoral College, but some will still vote third-party even after witnessing the consequences in 2016. (As an aside, ask yourself why third-party presidential candidates haven’t spent every waking moment since then getting more states to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and instead keep running when they have absolutely no chance of winning.) This system is very stupid, but nevertheless, I legitimately worry about how much anti-Harris sentiment online from blue-state voters will impact people in the states that actually matter.

I live in New York, so my presidential vote doesn’t matter for shit, but I’m still pulling the lever for Harris-Walz (and telling people about it) because I know who I want to fill any Supreme Court vacancies. Maybe people in swing states need to hear this, too. If I still lived in my home state of Pennsylvania, I know I couldn’t live with myself if my vote led to bans on gay marriage or birth control.