The Supreme Court Is Getting High on its Own Supply
Kristoffer Ealy
Before we get into what this Supreme Court is doing now, it is worth remembering what it has always been capable of. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It took Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to begin correcting the most catastrophic of those failures — and even then, states had to be dragged toward compliance like toddlers toward a bath. The Court has always had the capacity for moral failure at scale. What is different now is the combination of ambition and costume.
Ever since the conservative supermajority took over, people would ask me how often I thought the Supreme Court was making sound decisions. My answer was 65% of the time. People would hear that and say “well, that’s not too bad” and I would have to explain to them slowly — the way you explain things to someone who just failed a test and somehow thought the curve would save them — that 65% is an F. It has always been an F. The letter F did not recently renegotiate its meaning to accommodate six people in Halloween costumes pretending to interpret law.
That was before Louisiana v. Callais. I can’t give them the 65 anymore. And I say that as someone who watched this chainsaw scene coming from three highway exits back.
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