CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump’s Supreme Court: A Rightist Juggernaut

Photo by Jackie Hope on Unsplash

The Supreme Court has been on a partisan, right-wing rampage lately, and the results for everyone from migrants to gun-crime victims to voters swamped by corporate dark money in campaigns are disastrous. On June 25, the high court let Trump end temporary protections for Syrian and Haitian migrants, ruled that migrants couldn’t apply for asylum from Mexico, blocked thousands of suits charging the Roundup weed-killer with causing cancer and invalidated limits on public gun-carrying in Hawaii – and that was just in one day!

For the environmentally and health-minded, the Roundup decision is catastrophic. According to the Washington Post June 25, the seven-person judicial majority “ruled Monsanto was not required to offer a warning because the Environmental Protection Agency holds that Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is not a cancer risk.” Tell that to the Lebanese people coated in glyphosate (and white phosphorus) by Israel; I’m sure it’ll reassure them. Not. The high court may have okayed cancer-causing Roundup’s marketing “as safe to spray in a T-shirt and shorts,” as one plaintiff’s attorney derisively put it, but only Israel sprays it more promiscuously, directly onto people, and the purpose is, quite explicitly, to kill human beings. The IDF ain’t concerned about rooting out dandelions in South Lebanon.

The Roundup plaintiff, John Durnell, had won a $1.25 million award from Monsanto, owned by Bayer, delivered by a Missouri jury in 2023. Durnell claimed Roundup caused his blood cancer. Though the EPA has not found the key Roundup ingredient, glyphosate, carcinogenic, in 2015 an agency affiliated with the World Health Organization did, saying it was “probably carcinogenic to humans,” and in particular linked a specific blood cancer – the sort Durnell contracted – to the chemical. “The finding,” per WaPo, “also led to more than 100,000 people with cancer…filing lawsuits against Monsanto…Bayer has spent about $11 billion on settlements to date, but thousands of cases remain open.”

Many of those cases are now kaput, null and void, finito, because “Monsanto asked the Supreme Court to immunize it from nonfederal lawsuits,” which the Supremes promptly did. So if you got cancer for Roundup and filed your........

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