It's time ...

 

One study found that the Supreme Court led since 2005 by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been “uniquely willing to check executive authority.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

This dark figure in this NYTimes pix shows, in indirect fashion, how this court conducts business on the sly in appropriating ever more power at the expense of the balance of power in this once great nation known as America.

WASHINGTON — The conventional critique of the Supreme Court these days is that it has lurched to the right and is out of step with the public on many issues. That is true so far as it goes.

But a burst of recent legal scholarship makes a deeper point, saying the current court is distinctive in a different way: It has rapidly been accumulating power at the expense of every other part of the government.

To whit

The past few years have marked the emergence of the imperial Supreme Court. Armed with a new, nearly bulletproof majority, conservative Justices on the Court have embarked on a radical restructuring of American law across a range of fields and disciplines. Unlike previous shifts in the Court, this one isn’t marked by debates over federal versus state power, or congressional versus judicial power, or judicial activism versus restraint. Nor is it marked by the triumph of one form of constitutional interpretation over another. On each of those axes, the Court’s recent opinions point in radically different directions. The Court has taken significant, simultaneous steps to restrict the power of Congress, the administrative state, the states, and the lower federal courts. And it has done so using a variety of (often contradictory) interpretative methodologies. The common denominator across multiple opinions in the last two years is that they concentrate power in one place: the Supreme Court.

It's time to pack or limit the power of the supremes, something the senate can do without issue.