The Supermajority
How the Supreme Court Divided America
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
A “terrific, if chilling, account” (The Guardian) of how the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority is overturning decades of law and leading the country in a dangerous political direction.
In The Supermajority, Michael Waldman explores the tumultuous 2021–2022 Supreme Court term. He draws deeply on history to examine other times the Court veered from the popular will, provoking controversy, and backlash. And he analyzes the most important new rulings and their implications for the law and for American society. Waldman asks: What can we do when the Supreme Court challenges the country?
Over three days in June 2022, the conservative supermajority overturned the constitutional right to abortion, possibly opening the door to reconsider other major privacy rights, as Justice Clarence Thomas urged. The Court sharply limited the authority of the EPA, reducing the prospects for combatting climate change. It radically loosened curbs on guns amid an epidemic of mass shootings. It fully embraced legal theories such as “originalism” that will affect thousands of cases throughout the country.
These major decisions—and the next wave to come—will have enormous ramifications for every American.
It was the most turbulent term in memory—with the leak of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the first Black woman justice sworn in, and the justices turning on each other in public, Waldman previews the 2022–2023 term and how the brewing fights over the Supreme Court and its role that already have begun to reshape politics.
The Supermajority is “a call to action as much as it is a history of the Supreme Court “ (Financial Times) at a time when the Court’s dysfunction—and the demand for reform—are at the center of public debate.
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Waldman (The Fight to Vote), president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, delivers a persuasive analysis of the Supreme Court's 2021–2022 term and how "decades of organized politics" brought it to a "point of judicial extremism and overreach." During the cultural revolutions of the 1950s and '60s, chief justice Earl Warren led the court's efforts to expand and protect civil rights, leading to such landmark decisions as Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona, but also exacerbating tensions between the right and the left as the latter became "enamored of litigation as a driver of social change and came to hold the Supreme Court itself in near-religious reverence." Eventually, Waldman writes, "intense divisions within Congress spread to judicial nominations and came to be the central fact in how American courts were comprised." Among more recent rulings, Waldman highlights 2010's Citizens United, which "remade American politics" to give more influence to the wealthy, and Shelby County v. Holder, which significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. He also delves into the links between the Federalist Society and the three conservative justices appointed by Donald Trump, and takes note of the historical precedents behind the 2022 Dobbs leak, which contributed to a "tense, accusatory, and suspicious" atmosphere within the court as it released other consequential and controversial rulings on gun rights and environmental regulations. Brisk yet detailed, this is a valuable overview of how America's highest court became such a lightning rod.
