Five Ways to Fix the Court

How to Rebalance the Court

As Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearing comes to a close today, the Supreme Court’s role in our economy and democracy has come to the fore: An unrepresentative majority has tipped the scales in favor of corporations and against racial justice.  

As Roosevelt’s Shahrzad Shams writes in The Week, the court’s decisions over the past few decades “have actively served to dismantle the legal architecture of racial and economic progress”—including weakening voting rights, worker protections, women’s rights to bodily autonomy, and environmental protections. 

To solve that problem, we must both ensure the court looks more like the country, and address the institution’s structural flaws, which create and perpetuate such imbalances throughout our society. 

Learn more in “Off-Balance: Five Strategies for a Judiciary that Supports Democracy,” by Roosevelt’s Todd N. Tucker.

A Green Steel Deal

“By increasing demand for less carbon-intensive steel and aluminum produced by American and European companies, we can account for the cost of high-carbon steel and help industries succeed,” US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said during a Roosevelt webcast about the new US-EU Green Steel Deal earlier this week.

The webcast convened a panel of experts to discuss how the “Global Steel and Aluminum Arrangement” will transform our economy, the effect it will have on meeting our climate goals, what we should expect and watch for as the plans advance, and more.

“It will take a tremendous amount of ongoing investment to generate economic, environmental and social benefits spread well into the future,” Roosevelt Senior Fellow Saule Omarova said. “It will also require a great deal of coordination among many actors and on many levels to ensure capital is deployed to the maximum benefit of the American people.”

Watch a recording of the webcast. 

What We’re Reading

Saule Omarova’s Plan for “Public Venture Capital” – Axios

We’re in a Fossil Fuel War. Biden Should Say So. [feat. Roosevelt’s Rhiana Gunn-Wright] – New York Times

American Companies Can’t Sugarcoat Their Carbon Pollution Anymore – The Atlantic

As Air Pollution Declined, Tribal Nations Got Left Out – Bloomberg CityLab

The Federal Minimum Wage Hasn’t Risen in Almost 13 Years and US Workers Are Paying the Price – CNN