The case against the Supreme Court
Ian Millhiser at Vox, The Roe opinion and the case against the Supreme Court of the United States:
[Dismantling voting rights], moreover, is consistent with the history of an institution that once blessed slavery and described Black people as “beings of an inferior order.” It is consistent with the Court’s history of union-busting, of supporting racial segregation, and of upholding concentration camps.
Moreover, while the present Court is unusually conservative, the judiciary as an institution has an inherent conservative bias. Courts have a great deal of power to strike down programs created by elected officials, but little ability to build such programs from the ground up. Thus, when an anti-governmental political movement controls the judiciary, it will likely be able to exploit that control to great effect. But when a more left-leaning movement controls the courts, it is likely to find judicial power to be an ineffective tool.
The Court, in other words, simply does not deserve the reverence it still enjoys in much of American society, and especially from the legal profession. For nearly all of its history, it’s been a reactionary institution, a political one that serves the interests of the already powerful at the expense of the most vulnerable. And it currently appears to be reverting to that historic mean.
My anti-Supreme-Court rhetoric as of late felt like my own conclusion, but of course it is just a result of me reading people smarter and better-read than myself. Case in point, Gerald Rosenberg’s “The Hollow Hope”:
Rosenberg’s most depressing conclusion is that, while liberal judges are severely constrained in their ability to effect progressive change, reactionary judges have tremendous ability to hold back such change. “Studies of the role of the courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Rosenberg writes, “show that courts can effectively block significant social reform.”
So if you live in what is nominally a representative democracy, but two out of three of the branches of Federal government (again, as pointed out by Millhiser) are structured to hold back societal improvement by granting such great, stubborn power to a minority belief (e.g. abortion prohibition)… what, precisely, do you do?