Court’s ‘revolutionary’ term
Conservative majority seems poised to keep control of court for years to come
Abortion, guns and religion — a major change in the law in any one of these areas would have made for a fateful US Supreme Court term. In its first full term together, the court’s conservative majority ruled in all three and issued other significant decisions limiting the government’s regulatory powers.
And it has signalled no plans to slow down.
With former President Donald Trump’s appointees in their 50s, the six-justice conservative majority seems poised to keep control of the court for years to come, if not decades.
“This has been a revolutionary term in so many respects,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas. “The court has massively changed constitutional law in really big ways.”
Its remaining opinions issued, the court began its summer recess on Saturday, and the justices will next return to the courtroom in October.
Overturning Roe v Wade and ending a nearly half-century guarantee of abortion rights had the most immediate impact, shutting down or severely restricting abortions in roughly a dozen states within days of the decision.
In expanding gun rights and finding religious discrimination in two cases, the justices also made it harder to sustain gun control laws and lowered barriers to religion in public life.
Setting important new limits on regulatory authority, they reined in the government’s ability to fight climate change and blocked a Biden administration effort to get workers at large companies vaccinated against Covid-19.
The remarkable week at the end of June in which the guns, abortion, religion and environmental cases were decided at least partially obscured other notable events.
New Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in on Friday as the first black woman on the court. She replaced the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, a switch that won’t change the balance between liberals and conservatives on the court.
In early May, the court had to deal with the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion in the abortion case.
Chief Justice John Roberts almost immediately ordered an investigation, about which the court has
The biggest question was not so
much which direction the court was headed in, but how fast it was
going. Greg Garre, former Supreme Court
lawyer
been mum ever since. Soon after, workers encircled the court with 2.4m-high fencing in response to security concerns. In June, police made a late-night arrest of an armed man near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home, and charged him with attempted murder of the justice.
Kavanaugh is one of three Trump appointees, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who fortified the right side of the court.
Greg Garre, who served as President George W Bush’s top Supreme Court lawyer, said when the court began its term in October “the biggest question was not so much which direction the court was headed in, but how fast it was going. The term answers that question pretty resoundingly, which is fast”.
Roberts, who favours a more incremental
approach, broke most notably with the other conservatives in the abortion case, writing that it was unnecessary to overturn Roe, which he called a “serious jolt” to the legal system.
If the past year revealed limits on the chief justice’s influence, it also showcased the sway of Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving member of the court. He wrote the decision expanding gun rights and the abortion case marked the culmination of his 30-year effort on the Supreme Court to get rid of Roe, which had stood since 1973.
It’s not clear, though, that other justices are as comfortable as Thomas in overturning past decisions.
The abortion and guns cases also seemed contradictory to some critics in that the court handed states authority over the most personal decisions, but limited state power in regulating guns. One distinction the majorities in those cases drew, though, is that the US Constitution explicitly mentions guns, but not abortion.
Those decisions do not seem especially popular with the public, according to opinion polls. Polls show a sharp drop in the court’s approval rating and in people’s confidence in the court as an institution.
Defenders of the court’s decisions said the criticism misses the mark because it confuses policy with law.
“Supreme Court decisions are often not about what the policy should be, but rather about who (or which level of government, or which institution) should make the policy,” Princeton University political scientist Robert George wrote on Twitter.