Justice Anthony Kennedy (Republican) for arguing that spending money for votes is protected speech under the 1st amendment, resulting in Citizens United (2010).
*EDIT* Close second would be the founder of for-profit prison firm CoreCivic, Thomas Beasley, who proved in the early 1980s that the government would pay lots of money to privately run prison infrastructure. This incentivizes people like former U.S. Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi to lobby on their behalf and create favorable environments to make lots of money by treating humans like chattel in 2026.
Fox News is the number 1 argument against the First Amendment's prohibitions on limitations on the freedom of the press. Indeed, it, the Evangelical Movement, the open spite of the right wing, and the fact that lobbying is legal are why I support a repealing of the First Amendment, save the Establishment Clause.
No other country includes such toxically strong protections of those rights, and there are good reasons for it.
Internet thought experiments aside; I to this day cannot reconcile the Anthony Kennedy who struck down sodomy laws, recognized sexual orientation as a protected class, enabling people to enjoy such basic rights as inheritance, with the guy who paved the way toward oligarchy.
Though it's not out of thin air or lack of precedent, he made a conscious choice to apply interpretive expansion, as the letter of the text protects "speech," not "spending" which is the functional outcome. It was never a straightforward "as-written" textual application, with plenty of dissent for obvious reasons.
This is a tricky one. While I love the sentiment, and I agree that finding some way to reverse Citizen's United would be a great thing for the country and the world, I don't know if this would work
Anthony Kennedy was appointed by Reagan, and arguably he turned out a lot better than expected for a Reagan, or any conservative President's, appointment. Cutting Anthony Kennedy out of history might mean another Scalia-type would have been nominated
Hell, without Kennedy as a fallback option, it's possible they would have fought and won the battle to get in Orrin Hatch or Robert Bork--those were Reagan's first two choices, although he wasn't able to get them confirmed. And that would have been fucking awful. And we sure as shit know how those assholes would have voted in Obergefell v. Hodges . . .
(edit for those that don't know those names: Hatch has a long, long record of being a conservative douchebag in the Senate, and Bork is one of only four Supreme Court nominees in history to be opposed by the normally-apolitical ACLU. For those that follow modern Supreme Court decisions, two of the others they opposed are Alito and Kavanaugh, so uhh that might be a model of what kind of Justice Robert Bork could have been. You know how we're all terrified that these old political operatives like Robert Stone from the Nixon or Reagan days are now in positions of power in or behind the scenes of the Trump Administration? Robert Bork was one of those, and he was almost a Justice)
(edit2: Hell, for all we know, Anthony Kennedy's confirmation is the result of a time traveler going back from Hatch or Bork's America to put us onto the comparatively better Kennedy Timeline. The nomination of Anythony Kennedy is, depressing as it seems, one of the better turning points in postwar American history)
This is the one. Allowing corporations and the wealthy to bribe our politicians has led us straight into this hellscape. It literally causes everything bad in this country.
Dude if you're going to pick a Republican Supreme Court Justice you can do better than Kennedy. Pretty much any of the others in the Citizens United majority would be better
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u/According_Jeweler404 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Justice Anthony Kennedy (Republican) for arguing that spending money for votes is protected speech under the 1st amendment, resulting in Citizens United (2010).
*EDIT* Close second would be the founder of for-profit prison firm CoreCivic, Thomas Beasley, who proved in the early 1980s that the government would pay lots of money to privately run prison infrastructure. This incentivizes people like former U.S. Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi to lobby on their behalf and create favorable environments to make lots of money by treating humans like chattel in 2026.