How Liberals Should Confront a Right-Wing Supreme Court

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/opinion/liberals-supreme-court-constitution.html

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https://archive.ph/IPQ2n

For American progressives, the Supreme Court has become a maddening institution. The comforting notion of the court as umpire lies in tatters. It is Justice Samuel Alito’s court now: methodologically flexible but ideologically rigid.

Last term, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court struck down Roe v. Wade on ostensibly originalist grounds, yet this term it is poised to strike down affirmative action on grounds that make a mockery of original understandings. The court proclaims its fidelity to the past but is actually a font of legal innovation, inventing, for example, novel counter-reforms to the American political system that entrench minority rule by the Republican Party.

These disparate outcomes are consistent in precisely one way: They turn the ideological and partisan preferences of conservative Republicans into legal changes, and these are reshaping our political and economic systems, making them more hospitable to oligarchy.

But the Supreme Court does not have the only word, or even the last word, on the meaning of the Constitution. Liberals must rediscover that basic fact, and the tradition in American politics in which political actors outside the court, especially Congress and the president, use the political tools available to them to assert their own rival constitutional visions, sometimes setting up high-stakes political confrontations with the court.

Instead of trying to legislate within the lines of Supreme Court case law — lines that might be redrawn tomorrow — liberal lawmakers should view the court primarily as a hostile political actor with its own distinctive political incentives, internal divisions and weaknesses.

*snip*

[BWdem4life]

1. With pitchforks?

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. The Extreme Court is a political arm for the radicalized Republican party.

Roe, Roe, Roe your vote
against theocracy!
Republicans revoke your rights
and kill democracy!

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