We’re Going To Need So Much Judicial Review

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Just because a handful of corrupt, anti-constitutional jurists on the country’s highest court have weaponized a core concept of constitutional jurisprudence, doesn’t mean it’s bad. As a guy who has blogged roughly one thousands times over the past four years about ways to protect constitutional democracy from right-wing judges who have spent their lives studying the bad-faith dark arts, I fully understand your impetus to reject any and every tactic used by John Roberts and his nakedly anti-American right-wing Supreme Court majority . Support the reader-backed Bad Faith Times with $5 a month and join the Bad Faith Times discord channel. You can also subscribe for free . It’s this reflexive rejection of the Roberts Court’s dishonest and anti-democracy tactics that might lead one to take a hard and fast stance against judicial review, the legal concept that has allowed this Supreme Court to revisit long-held constitutional precedents and dismantle them one at a time in service of the oligarch class for whom they serve and the radicalized Republican Party for whom they enable. Judicial review must be bad, you might say because you hate what this Court – this captured institution – has done to your country. We must do away with it, the thinking might go in the coming years if pro-democracy liberal justices ever have a majority of elected Democrats do that right thing and reform (expand) the Court. Judicial review, after all, is how the husk or Roe was killed and modest limitations on campaign contributions were undone. It’s how Roberts and the Court’s right wing have delivered body blows to the Voting Rights Act, which will be effectively wiped away in the coming months. Judicial review is how this deeply corrupt and wildly compromised Court has undone the gains of the 20th century, as Thurgood Marshall warned way back in the early 90s. Here’s the thing though: The vile jurisprudence of the Roberts Court cannot be fixed unless the left embraces judicial review as a corrective measure in bringing the United States back into the democratic fold from which it has steadily drifted since Roberts was tasked with implementing the right’s legal wishlist twenty years ago. Read more at BadFaithTimes.com .