The Supreme Court of the United States is more conservative today than at any point since the 1930s. It’s also more confident in its own power than any panel of justices since the Franklin Roosevelt administration. And it is quite eager to wipe away foundational precedents that have stood for decades, sometimes without much warning that a transformational decision is around the corner.
Consider the Court’s recent decision upending five decades of abortion jurisprudence. By allowing a Texas law banning at least 85 percent of abortions to take effect, the justices followed none of the procedural norms that their predecessors typically adhered to before upending a famous Supreme Court precedent.
The order allowing Texas’s anti-abortion law to go into effect is one paragraph long. It does not even attempt to engage with the legal questions presented by that law. And it was decided on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other rushed cases that receive only cursory briefing before they are decided by the justices. In total, the justices seem to have spent about two days pondering this case before upsetting a half-century of law.
As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote, “neutralizing Roe through normal channels would have taken time, and the Supreme Court’s conservatives did not want to wait.” So the five justices in the majority decided that the ordinary rules did not apply “because they felt like it, and because they don’t believe anyone can stop them.”
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