The Supreme Court's 1908 ruling in Ex parte Young was a judicial expansion of remedies to enforce the Constitution that came in direct response to efforts by a state (Minnesota) to thwart the enforcement of a controversial constitutional right by exploiting prior #SCOTUS rulings
Against that backdrop, the outrage at the possibility that the current Supreme Court might revisit the core principles underlying that decision in response to similarly deliberate efforts by a state to frustrate the enforcement of constitutional rights is rather ... ahistorical.
Ex parte Young got around Hans v. Louisiana—which held that states can’t be sued in federal court without their consent (by reading the word “another” out of the Eleventh Amendment)—by holding that suits against state officers *aren’t* against the state, at least under the 11A.
The notion that a decision that reflected such a functional accommodation of two competing principles (sovereign immunity and enforceable constitutional rights) is somehow a formal obstacle to future decisions reaching similar accommodations really requires ignoring that context.
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