Court ready to remake law

The more partisan the Supreme Court has become, the more insistent the court’s justices — especially those in the conservative supermajority — have become that when they consider cases their minds are pristine, unsullied by even a moment’s concern for politics.

Yet this Monday, the court began a term that is nothing less than the culmination of a 40-year long effort by the conservative movement to take over the courts and haul American law to the right. What happens in the coming months has been decades in the making, and at least in the short term, there’s nothing the rest of us can do to stop it.

You might find that a bit hyperbolic. After all, in recent years the court has already delivered one victory after another to the right. They eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, they gave religious business owners the ability to exempt themselves from laws they don’t like, they created an individual right to own guns, they made it harder to organize unions, and much more. Though liberals have won a few recent victories at the court (particularly while Anthony Kennedy was still the swing vote), it has been moving steadily right for some time.

But this term is different. As the justices showed when they allowed Texas to implement its blatantly unconstitutional antiabortion vigilante law, they are no longer feeling constrained. While some of them may have thin skins when criticized, they won’t let it stop them from achieving their goals.

Here’s just some of what could happen this term:

■ Roe. v. Wade overturned: The court will hear a challenge to a Mississippi case outlawing abortions after 15 weeks of gestation; most experts see it as the vehicle they will use to overturn Roe and allow states to outlaw abortion completely.

■ Gun safety laws struck down: In a case involving a New York state law governing gun permits, the justices could drastically limit the ability of states and localities to limit who can own guns and where they can take them.

■ Federal government’s ability to implement laws restricted: In a case concerning Medicaid and drug prices, the court is being urged by conservatives to drastically curtail the ability of federal agencies to implement laws passed by Congress when those laws delegate broad authority to the agencies. That could have profound implications on, for instance, matters such as whether the EPA can move to limit climate change.

■ Division between church and state further eroded: The court has been steadily carving out special privileges for religious people, especially religious Christians. In a case involving a program in Maine that pays for students to attend private schools in areas where there is no public high school, the court could strike down the program’s prohibition on public funding of religious schools.

The abortion case will get the biggest headlines, but all these — and more the court will hear — have potentially significant consequences. For all that the conservatives on the court keep giving speeches about how apolitical they are, this is the moment they’ve been waiting for.

All the conservative justices on the court sit where they do precisely because of the decades-long effort to move the court to the right. Most of them were nurtured and then vouched for by the Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization created in 1982 whose mission is to promote conservatives who will eventually ascend to the bench.

All six of them either worked in Republican administrations or for Republican campaigns, or both.

And because they now have a 6-3 majority, they can lose a justice on any given case and still prevail. If, say, Chief Justice Roberts hesitates to go as far as the conservatives want in a particular case, even without him they already have five votes. The justice at the court’s ideological median is now the extremely conservative Brett Kavanaugh.

Their very public protestations of impartiality are convincing precisely no one — least of all the Republicans who cheer for them and worked to put them on the court.

When Justice Amy Coney Barrett insists the court is apolitical while speaking at an event honoring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, you have to believe that either they think we’re all stupid or they just don’t care.

“We are within sight of a full-blown legitimacy crisis” for the Supreme Court, says law professor Steve Vladeck. But I suspect that in the end that’s a price the court’s conservatives will be willing to pay, so long as they can be protected by the Republican Party’s ability to hold power far in excess of its support among the electorate (which the court itself has made possible with multiple cases approving GOP voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering).

Despite what they claim, what matters to the Supreme Court’s majority is not some abstract judicial philosophy and not the vague intent of the Framers, so easy to apply in any way one likes to a world they could never have imagined. No, what matters is the result: the remaking of American law to suit conservative preferences. Get ready for it, because they’re just getting started.