Linda Greenhouse: Do We Have the Supreme Court We Deserve? - The New York Times

In the last of her biweekly columns on the Supreme Court, Linda Greenhouse's answer is NO.

Greenhouse has been writing about the court for over forty years in the pages of the NY Times. - GWC

Opinion | Do We Have the Supreme Court We Deserve? - The New York Times

By Linda Greenhouse

***Yet what we see from the court is not humility but, to put it politely, a lack of situational awareness. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, something the court has given every indication that it will do within the next six months. Three-quarters of respondents in one recent poll said the abortion decision should be left to women and their doctors. (That was also the view of a majority of the public in a Gallup poll released in the summer of 1972, shortly before the court issued its decision in Roe.)

Hundreds of pages of briefing in the Mississippi abortion case that was argued this month failed to unearth a single reason other than “because we want to and because we can” for overturning a 49-year-old precedent that the court reaffirmed in crucial respects two decades later in the carefully considered compromise that was the Casey decision. (All five members of the Casey majority were appointed by Republican presidents, just as are all those who stand on the verge of repudiating that same precedent today.)

It is now four months and counting since the court permitted the obviously unconstitutional Texas vigilante law, known as Senate Bill 8, to all but shut down abortion in the state, a situation the 5-to-4 majority has refused to rectify. Instead, the court made a show of expediting the S.B. 8 argument in early November and then issued a Potemkin village-like opinion that resulted only in pushing a resolution further into an unknown future.