James Fallows believes the conservative members of the Supreme Court are engaged in a slow motion, long-term coup d’etat.
[W]hen you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, through Citizens United, to what seems to be coming on the health-care front; and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we’d identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but what we know is this: while it has occasionally been political, the Supreme Court isn’t supposed to be a political entity. Add politics to the mix and you get a quasi-legislative body that pursues vendettas and decides based on party loyalty. And this legislative body has the power to trump the other two branches of government in a way that’s virtually irreversible. The Roberts Court is doing just that, while also trying to roll back decades of precedent.
