When you cover this Supreme Court for a living, it is tempting to fall into despair.
The Court has spent the last few years relitigating long-settled fights over abortion and affirmative action. It consistently rules that the rights of LGBTQ Americans, women using birth control, and even people who don’t want to catch a deadly disease must give way to the whims of the Christian Right.
Under its three-year-old Republican supermajority, the Court took a decidedly post-legal turn. It routinely relies on fabricated legal rules, such as the so-called major questions doctrine, to veto liberal policies like President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program or to undermine environmental protections.
Its guns decision in New York State Rifle v. Bruen (2022) is an incompetent train wreck, which has baffled lower court judges and produced appalling results — including an appeals court decision holding that a law prohibiting individuals from “possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order” is unconstitutional.
And yet, despite all of this, I am far more optimistic about the future of the United States than I was a year ago, and a big reason why is the Supreme Court’s behavior over the last several months.
When the Court opened its latest term last October, my level of alarm was about a 13 out of 10. The GOP-appointed justices had just completed an orgy of conservative grudge settling, including its decision overruling Roe v. Wade. Worse, the Court planned to hear new cases that could legalize racial gerrymandering, gut Medicaid, and potentially even destroy US democracy altogether.
A little less than a year later, my level of alarm is down to a nine. The Court’s last term gave anyone to the left of Brett Kavanaugh no shortage of outrages, but it left Medicaid intact. It shut down an argument that many of Donald Trump’s nativist appointees to the lower courts used to seize control of federal immigration policy. And, on the…
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