[spanktheuser]

Long term, I wonder if this destroys the Supreme Court. I see no reason why a future liberal majority would feel bound by any conservative precedent in the future. Replace respect for precedent with whatever position wins a majority and the incentive to pack the court seems irresistible.

[ttyprintk]

And this would be true for any activist court. To me, the combination of a flaccid Congress plus activist court implies an era of disposable precedents.

[rootusrootus]

That seems likely. We already see it in the executive, with sweeping policy changes every time the office changes parties. Seems to be what we want, however, collectively.

[maxwell]

Seems like we're evolving from common to civil law, probably for the better in the long run.

[kergonath]

I tend to agree that civil law should be better over the long term, but I don’t see this Supreme Court letting that happen. They pretend to be deferent to congress when congress is ineffective or on their side, but the script can be easily flipped or used both ways at the same time like they do with states rights. But ultimately they would not let themselves be constrained by a hostile congress.

[throwawa14223]

The pendulum swings. For decades we had an activist progressive court and now we have an activist conservative court.

[AnimalMuppet]

There was a 7-2 liberal majority during the 1970s. They didn't feel bound by precedent either. That's how we got, for example, Roe v. Wade. (No, there was no precedent for "a penumbra" of privacy giving a right to abortion in any previous court decisions. And whether you like the decision is orthogonal to whether the court was making stuff up completely outside the realm of precedent.)

Conservatives aren't doing something that liberals have not done. Liberals will probably do it again when they have the chance. And so will conservatives.

You don't have to like it, either because it goes against what you want or because you don't think decisions should be made like that. But don't think that this hasn't happened before.

[mullingitover]

> There was a 7-2 liberal majority during the 1970s.

Can you break this down? I'm looking at the Martin-Quinn graph[1] for the 70s and I'm seeing a pretty centrist, if not majority conservative, slant for that decade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin%E2%80%93Quinn_score

[silverquiet]

How do you imagine a liberal majority would come about within the next few decades? This was engineered over decades and now the conservatives have all the marbles; that's why they feel so free to rule how they've always wanted.

[spanktheuser]

I imagine you’d need circumstances similar to those that nearly resulted in the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have granted Roosevelt the ability to appoint 6 additional Supreme Court Justices. Namely:

- National crisis unifying popular support for liberal legislation. - Liberal control of the executive and legislative branches. - A series of supreme court rulings that effectively thwart a popular liberal agenda.

I have no idea if this is likely; however it nearly happened less than a century ago during a period with noticeable parallels to our circumstances today.