Thread by @JillWineBanks

.@jbouie said so much so powerfully that I'm starting a thread with some of his best lines, but recommend reading the whole piece re SCOTUS threat to our rights and its loss of credibility.
nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opi…

the court has essentially nullified the constitutional rights of millions of American women without so much as an argument...This isn’t judicial review as much as it is a raw exercise of judicial power. ...

It is common enough knowledge that the Supreme Court’s power to shape American society is a function not so much of its formal power under the Constitution as it is of its popular legitimacy. And much of that legitimacy rests on the idea that the court is acting fairly, ...

transparently and in good faith. It rests, as well, on the idea of the court as a partner in governance and a safeguard for the rights of the American people. Or, as Franklin Roosevelt said in a 1937 “fireside chat” on his plan to restructure the Supreme Court...

in response to the intransigence of conservative justices: “We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution and not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.”

The court’s abuse of the shadow docket is in that category: ...

The court’s abuse of the shadow docket is in that category: ... actions that threaten to place the rule of men over the rule of law. It’s not that the court is political — that is to be expected — but that its conservative majority is acting in arbitrary, secretive ways, ...

with hardly any justification other than its own power to do so. Antifederalist opponents of the Constitution feared that the judiciary’s expansive power would consume all others:

“This power in the judicial will enable them to mould the government into almost any shape they please,” wrote “Brutus” in a January 1788 essay. The majority in the Texas case, three-fifths of it appointed by President Donald Trump, seems intent on proving Brutus’s point. ...

One last thing. In his first Inaugural Address, delivered almost four years to the day after the court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, Abraham Lincoln warned that ...

“if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then 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.”...

The shadow docket aside, the extent to which political outcomes in America rest on the opaque machinations of a cloistered, nine-member clique is the clearest possible sign that we’ve given too much power to this institution. ...

We can have self-government or we can have rule by judge, but we cannot have both.