America Has a Supreme Court Problem

The U.S. Supreme Court begins its term today and save for Christofascists who are the darlings of the extremist majority on the Court (and the very wealthy), no one's rights can be considered secure.  This is especially so if one doesn't have white skin or is not heterosexual.   At the same time the confidence of Americans in the Court is at the lowest point ever recorded - not that justices Thomas, Alito and the rest of the extremists care.  For this majority, all that counts is imposing their own extreme religious and social beliefs on the country and furthering the interests of the Republican Party and its candidates. Never in the four and a half decades that I have closely followed the Court has a majority been so blatantly partisan and contemptuous of the views of the vast majority of Americans.  With the GOP seeking permanent minority rule through any means possible, the nation finds itself in a very dangerous place.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the frightening situation.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court’s authority within the American political system is both immense and fragile. Somebody has to provide the last word in interpreting the Constitution, and — this is the key — to do so in a way that is seen as fair and legitimate by the people at large.

What happens when a majority of Americans don’t see it that way?

A common response to this question is to say the justices shouldn’t care. They aren’t there to satisfy the majority or to be swayed by the shifting winds of public opinion. That is partly true: The court’s most important obligations include safeguarding the constitutional rights of vulnerable minorities who can’t always count on protection from the political process and acting independently of political interests.

But in the bigger picture, the court nearly always hews close to where the majority of the American people are. If it does diverge, it should take care to do so in a way that doesn’t appear partisan. That is the basis of the trust given to the court by the public.

That trust, in turn, is crucial to the court’s ability to exercise the vast power Americans have granted it. . . . . A court that does not keep that trust cannot perform its critical role in American government.

And yet as the justices prepare to open a new term on Monday, fewer Americans have confidence in the court than ever before recorded. In a Gallup poll taken in June, before the court overturned Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, only 25 percent of respondents said they had a high degree of confidence in the institution. That number is down from 50 percent in 2001. . . . This widespread lack of confidence and trust in the nation’s highest court is a crisis, and rebuilding it is more important than the outcome of any single ruling.

Chief Justice John Roberts recently suggested that the court’s low public opinion is nothing more than sour grapes by those on the short end of recent rulings.

This is disingenuous. The court’s biggest decisions have always angered one group of people or another.

The actual cause of its historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party. This project was taking shape more quietly for decades, but it shifted into high gear in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and Senate Republicans refused to let Barack Obama choose his successor, obliterating the practice of deferring to presidents to fill vacancies on the court. Within four years, the court had a 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority, supercharging the Republican appointees’ efforts to discard the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.

As a result, the court’s legitimacy has been squandered in the service of partisan victories. The Dobbs decision in June, which overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminated American women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies and was a priority of the Republican Party for decades, is only the most glaring example. In cases involving money in politics, partisan gerrymandering and multiple suits challenging the Voting Rights Act, the court has ruled in ways that make it easier for Republicans and harder for Democrats to win elections.

For most of the court’s history, it was difficult to predict how a case would turn out based on the party of the president who nominated the justices. Even into the 21st century, as the country grew more polarized, the court’s rulings remained largely in line with the views of the average American voter. That is no longer the case.

In the process, the court has unmoored itself from both the Constitution it is sworn to protect and the American people it is privileged to serve. This could not be happening at a worse moment. Election deniers in the Republican Party are undermining the integrity of the American electoral system. Right-wing political violence is a present and growing threat.

It is precisely during times like these that the American people need the Supreme Court to play the role Chief Justice Roberts memorably articulated at his own confirmation hearing — that of an umpire calling balls and strikes, ensuring a fair playing field for all. Instead, the court’s right-wingers are calling balls for one team and strikes for the other.

The way the court went about eliminating the federal right to abortion is a prime example of this misuse of its power. First, the right-wing justices used the court’s “shadow docket,” which refers to orders issued in response to emergency applications without open hearings or any public explanation, to allow an obviously unconstitutional anti-abortion law in Texas to stand. They also agreed to hear a separate challenge out of Mississippi, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that didn’t formally ask them to overturn Roe v. Wade. When they chose to do so anyway, the majority opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, cherry-picked its historical examples and dismissed Roe as “egregiously wrong,” disdaining the work of earlier justices who had weighed the same constitutional questions carefully for decades.

In the coming months, the court will decide cases on affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act (yet again) and the power of state legislatures to ignore their own constitutions and even their voters. The rulings in these cases could dramatically reshape the country’s politics, and Americans should be able to trust that those rulings will be made by an impartial tribunal.

There is no clear solution to this crisis. Legal scholars have put forward many proposals for structural reform — expanding the number of justices, imposing term limits or stripping the court of jurisdiction over certain types of cases — but none are a perfect remedy to the court’s politicization.

In the meantime, it is worth remembering that the court heads only one branch of the federal government. Congress has far more power to counteract bad rulings than it generally uses — by doing its job and passing laws.

With a few exceptions, the Supreme Court rarely has been at the forefront of making America a more equal place. But we are not consigned to living under the thumb of a reactionary juristocracy. To the contrary, the meaning of the Constitution is far more than what the court decrees; it is the result of an ongoing conversation between the court and the American people. Those who protested the loss of their rights after the Dobbs decision, and those who showed their determination to protect those rights, as voters did in Kansas in August, are speaking directly to the court. When the justices stop listening, as they have at other moments in history, the people’s voices will eventually become too loud for them to ignore.