The Supreme Court and American Democracy

If Democrats get firm control of the White House and both houses of Congress (an unlikely event, though one that’s probably necessary if American Democracy is to be saved), they need to reshape the Supreme Court through legislative reforms, instituting term limits, and probably increasing its size. Their purpose in doing so would not be to politicize the judiciary. To the contrary, it would be to depoliticize the Court and rehabilitate it as an institution distinguished for its integrity, intellectual honesty, and fidelity to the Constitution and the law.

Robert Reich, in one of his acute observations on the state of our nation, has supplied the reason why this is so: “Today’s Supreme Court majority is a group of knee-jerk conservatives whose intellectual leader (to the extent they have one) is Samuel Alito, perhaps the most conceptually rigid and cognitively dishonest justice since Roger Taney.”