“For a long time, the Supreme Court had been conceived in popular imagination and civic culture as a protector of minority rights. The legal circles of the twentieth century grappled with the theory of “counter-majoritarian difficulty,” which held that the judiciary was a necessarily antidemocratic institution because in declaring a statute or executive action unconstitutional, they overruled the will of the people as expressed through their representatives, while another camp asserted that the Court could continue to advance democracy if it devoted itself to reinforcing the representation of minorities in political process.
But in 2022, such theories are growing ever more distant from reality. As one scholar put it in the California Law Review, the U.S. electorate is becoming “more racially and ethnically diverse, more geographically concentrated and homogeneous, and more divided, not only in its partisan affiliations, but in its values and its prospects for the future.”
The Court, however, has used its power neither to serve as a countermajoritarian counterweight nor to reinforce representation of a growing multiracial electorate. The result: A court that enables the entrenchment of “a shrinking white, conservative, exurban numerical minority to exert substantial control over the national government and its policies.””
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““You have a situation in which a minority party is imposing an ideological agenda that has been rejected by a clear majority of the country,” he said. Today, only one of the five justices who signed onto Dobbs was nominated by a president who won the popular vote, and one of them only made it to the court because of Republicans’ unwillingness to give former president Barack Obama’s nominee, now-Attorney General Merrick Garland, a hearing.”
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“This year, the Court also invalidated a regulation that permitted large workplaces to establish vaccine-or-test requirements. It also struck down a Maine ban on using taxpayer money to fund private religious schools. One day before Dobbs, it threw out a 100-year-old New York law that required gun owners to show “proper cause” to obtain conceal-carry permits, making it easier to carry a concealed gun in public…it also sided with a Christian high school football coach, allowing him to pray at the 50-yard line, even though the Court had held in 1962 that school-sponsored prayer violated the separation of church and state.”
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“The decisions that came after were no less significant. While the Court did clear the way for Biden to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, it also expanded the power of states to prosecute crimes on Indigenous reservations based on a state’s interest in public safety within “its territory,” and it curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce greenhouse emissions.
On the last day of its term, the Court also agreed to hear a case that could give state legislatures exclusive and near-absolute power to regulate federal elections in their states.”