Nytimes news quiz july 5th 20196/17/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() I also show that this result cannot be explained by any consistent judicial philosophy. Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once. In Part I, I show that the Court has not been favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments. We are in the era of the imperial Supreme Court. The Court of late gets its way, not by giving power to an entity whose political predilections are aligned with the Justices’ own, but by undercutting the ability of any entity to do something the Justices don’t like. Rather, my argument is that the Court has begun to implement the policy preferences of its conservative majority in a new and troubling way: by simultaneously stripping power from every political entity except the Supreme Court itself. Nor do I aim simply to make the legal realist point that the Justices will do what they want in the cases before them, though the last few Terms provide ample evidence for that claim too. My goal in this essay is not to criticize these decisions on the merits, though there is much to criticize lots of others will do that. The common denominator across multiple opinions in the last two years is that they concentrate power in one place: the Supreme Court. And it has done so using a variety of (often contradictory) interpretative methodologies. The Court has taken significant, simultaneous steps to restrict the power of Congress, the administrative state, the states, and the lower federal courts. On each of those axes, the Court’s recent opinions point in radically different directions. Nor is it marked by the triumph of one form of constitutional interpretation over another. ![]() Unlike previous shifts in the Court, this one isn’t marked by debates over federal versus state power, or congressional versus judicial power, or judicial activism versus restraint. Armed with a new, nearly bulletproof majority, conservative Justices on the Court have embarked on a radical restructuring of American law across a range of fields and disciplines. The past few years have marked the emergence of the imperial Supreme Court. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |