The Supreme Court
Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The Supreme Court’s new term begins Monday with the focus not on the court’s docket but on the court itself and a future that will be defined by the presidential election.
For the first time in decades, there will be only eight justices, not nine, to begin the new term. Also absent are the kind of big-ticket cases — involving immigration reform, affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act — that in recent years have catapulted the Supreme Court to the fore of American civic life.
Instead, the short-handed court has assembled a docket of more-modest cases — albeit ones that touch on contemporary controversies such as the role of race in criminal justice and politics, free speech and perhaps the treatment of transgender students.
Of far greater consequence is the fate of the court’s ideological balance. And on that question, the court finds itself like the rest of the country: waiting to see what happens on Nov. 8.
It has been […]
We are entertaining wholly bogus players as legitamite in our process today. A candidate for president with zero electoral or military experience, as one example. Or A Supreme Court, whose explicit charge is to defend the constitution that decided 5 to 3 in favor of Shrieff v Utah last year; which invalidates your protection to the fourth amendment from unreasonable search and seizure if you happen to have an outstanding traffic ticket. Between that and the People’s United decision that equates property with speech….. how can one steady one’s respect for ‘rule of law’, when it is incoherent at the very top?