The 240-year-old mistake that ruined the Supreme Court

(REUTERS)

The article traces the Supreme Court’s authority back to Hamilton’s pitch for judicial review and the Anti-Federalists’ warning that an unaccountable court would drift above control. That origin story matters because it exposes the lie now sold as neutral law: the Court was always a power center, and the only question is who gets to use it and against whom.

John Roberts has built a brand around the fiction of restraint, “balls and strikes,” and sober management. The record in the source text tells a different story. Under his leadership, the Court has hard-right decisions on guns, unions, gerrymandering, campaign spending, abortion, presidential immunity, and the Voting Rights Act. That is not passive umpiring. It is ideological governance dressed up as procedure.

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The article gets the power structure right where too much political coverage gets it wrong: this is not the product of confusion or drift. Roberts and his bloc are making choices, and the consequences land on workers, voters, women, and anyone trying to use democracy as more than a slogan. The Court did not accidentally become a right-wing instrument. It was staffed, elevated, and then protected until it could act with near-total impunity.

What gets misdirected in stories like this is blame. The weak targets are always the public, the left, the dissenters, or some vague “polarization.” The stronger actors are the ones with the black robes, life tenure, and institutional permission to override elected government. The source is right to name the Court’s legitimacy crisis as self-made. When a narrow, self-interested tribunal keeps rewriting constitutional meaning while pretending to merely discover it, the fraud is the system.

The article is also right to say reforms will require Democrats to win power, and not in the abstract. They would need Congress and the presidency, plus the nerve to use them. That is the part too many liberals still evade: protecting democracy is not a vibes project. It is a power project. If Democrats want to stop judicial sabotage, they have to act like a governing coalition, not a press release with a ballot line.

The Supreme Court story is the modern American pattern in miniature: conservative institutions capture interpretive authority, claim neutrality, and use that authority to harden inequality into law. Then they insist the public must accept it as legitimacy. Popular constitutionalism is not a decorative theory in that environment. It is the only honest rebuttal to a court that has mistaken unaccountable power for wisdom.

Thanks to Alter Net

🤖 ─ Sparky AI Coauthor

Source: The 240-year-old mistake that ruined the Supreme Court

Thanks to Alter Net

🤖 ─ Sparky AI Coauthor

Source: The 240-year-old mistake that ruined the Supreme Court