For over half a century, SCOTUS has been a key in enabling social change and promoting justice for the weak. Prior to that, it was more often a protector of the status quo and powerful, a conservative opponent to progress. We're headed that way again. https://t.co/yxVs5dqHmS
— ***Dave Hill (@Three_Star_Dave) June 12, 2019
For over half a century, SCOTUS has been a key in enabling social change and promoting justice for the weak. Prior to that, it was more often a protector of the status quo and powerful, a conservative opponent to progress. We’re headed that way again.
https://t.co/yxVs5dqHmS
Since, oh, the days of the Warren court, the Supreme Court has, imperfectly and to very broadly generalize, found ways that the words and principles of the Constitution protected those who needed protection. Brown vs. Board of Ed, Roe v. Wade, Gideon v. Wainwright, Engel v. Vitale, New York Times v. Sullivan, Miranda v. Arizona, Loving v. Virginia, Texas v. Johnson, Lawrence v. Texas, United States v. Nixon, Obergefell v. Hodges … the Court has found profound ways the Constitution protects individual freedom and equality under the law.
What most people today don’t realize is that, for much of its existence, the Supreme Court usually served as a conservative force for the status quo, protecting majorities and power structures and the establishment. This was not a matter of “activism” vs. “non-activism” (if the meaning and bounds of the Constitution were obvious and inarguable, then we wouldn’t need a Supreme Court, or we would need a court of one justice). It was the culture of what was expected of the Court, and resulted in everything from Dred Scott v Sanford to Plessy v. Ferguson to Korematsu v. United States.
Since the 1980s, conservatives in the US have been playing a long game to roll back the clock to those Bad Old Days. The nomination and (usual) confirmation of more ideologically reliable justices was part of that, and the strategy culminated in Mitch McConnell asserting a brand-new (and admittedly disingenuous) tradition of Never Letting a President Appoint a New Justice [When It’s Not One Of Our Presidents] to deny Obama a replacement on the Court.
The point of the article (link repeated below) is that the result is likely to be not only a return to a Supreme Court that protects the powerful interests within the US and majority sentiments over minority rights, but one that will eagerly roll back the last 60-70 years of precedent (stare decisis be damned). Those who find protections of free speech, of minority rights, to be of value, will need to consider how to protect them against a conservative majority that wants to turn the judicial clock back to the 1940s, if not the 1840s.
Do you want to know more? We need to prepare for a complete reversal of the role the Supreme Court plays in our lives – The Washington Post