Although Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the United States’ last eight presidential elections, the U.S. Supreme Court certainly doesn’t reflect that. Six of the High Court’s nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, and three of those six were appointed by one-term former President Donald Trump — who lost the popular vote in 2016 and lost both the popular vote and the electoral vote in 2020. Moreover, the Court’s socially conservative supermajority is way to the right of such GOP-appointed justices of the past as Sandra Day O’Connor.
It was this socially conservative majority that, on June 24, 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years with its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And journalist Cristian Farias, in an article published by Vanity Fair on August 25, warns that the worst may be yet to come from the High Court’s radical-right supermajority.
In the past, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the independent state legislature doctrine as nonsense. But Farias fears that the High Court of 2022 won’t see it that way.
The Supreme Court has recently issued decisions announcing that citizens have neither a constitutional right
to vote, nor the right to an education. Conservative judges have continually disavowed claims to any rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. In "Overruling Democracy, " celebrated law professor Jamin B. Raskin, argues that we need to develop a whole new set of rights, through amendments or court decisions, that revitalize and protect the democracy of everyday life. Detailing specific cases through interesting narratives, "Overruling Democracy" describes the transgressions of the Supreme Court against the Constitution and the people - and the faulty reasoning behind them -- and lays out the plan for the best way to back a more democratic system.
