The Supreme Court’s Conservative Supermajority Continues Its Work Rolling Back The 20th Century

When five conservative justices on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the right to an abortion in 2022, it signaled a new era for the court’s conservatism, one in which none of the rights and policies that emerged from the 20th century appeared safe.

It also spawned a debate over the internal dynamics of that conservative supermajority. Chief Justice John Roberts did not join his fellow conservatives in overturning Roe. Had Roberts lost control of the court to the conservative ultras like Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito? Would he regain control in the next term?

The decisions released at the close of the court’s most recent term in June ― ending affirmative action in higher education, declaring a new right to discriminate against gay couples and voiding President . College admissions officers finding ever more byzantine ways to increase minority enrollment is not the answer. Neither are efforts at creating new legal doctrines ― or trying to use existing conservative ones ― to win in the undemocratic arena of the judiciary.

The court’s political goals are clear. It is finishing the realignment that Reagan never completed. But it is vulnerable because the political majority that created the Reagan realignment no longer exists.

The question for liberals is how to build a political majority big enough to counter it. Trying to revive what is lost through the same old means of bureaucratic policymaking and judicial decisions is not the answer. The business of building a majority through politics is the only way to assert the power of the people over the anti-democratic whims of the justices.

As Abraham Lincoln said when confronting the court’s horrendous Dred Scott decision: “If the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court … the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”