The supreme court: the judges dividing the nation
“What is happening here?” Those were the words of the distraught speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, after hearing that the supreme court had overturned Roe v. Wade, the ruling protecting the right to abortion. And it is hard to believe that in the year 2022, American women are losing control of their own bodies, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. The US is turning from “a beacon of modernity to a benighted outlier” under the influence of reactionary justices who are “defying the majority will” in “terrifying” ways. As well as overturning Roe, the supreme court recently struck down New York’s restriction on carrying guns in public; and sabotaged plans to tackle climate change by limiting the federal government’s power to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. The 6-3 conservative majority on the supreme court are radical “judicial activists” undoing decades of law and government policy, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “[This is] not a court; it’s a junta.”
Spare me these hysterical warnings, said David Harsanyi on The Federalist. It is not undemocratic if the supreme court stops “dictating abortion policy by judicial fiat” and hands the issue back to the lawmakers of each state to decide. Democrats may disagree with the court’s rulings, but that doesn’t mean the justices are acting in bad faith. Those seeking “to delegitimise the supreme court for upholding the Constitution are no better than those who desire to overturn or delegitimise presidential elections”. If you believe in democracy, you have to accept the rules, agreed Jim Geraghty in National Review. You can’t cry foul whenever things don’t go your way.
It’s true that the Right won control of the supreme court “according to the rules of the game”, said Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. But the rules need changing. While the make-up of the court was less important in the days when politics was less fiercely partisan, it’s a highly contentious issue now. Democrats have won five of the past eight presidential elections, but – owing to a mixture of tactics and lucky timing – the Republicans have appointed six of nine justices, and 16 of the past 20. A fairer appointment system, perhaps with term limits, would rebalance things. Some worry that even modest reforms will destroy the court’s “veneer of non-partisanship. They should be more concerned that the court’s majority is doing this itself.”