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Odds are that very soon, the Supreme Court will become something it hasn’t been in nearly 50 years: made up of a majority of Democratic-appointed justices.
Ever since Abe Fortas’s resignation in 1969, the Court has either been split down the middle or, more often, made up primarily of Republican appointees. Some of those Republican appointees nonetheless turned out to be liberals, but even taking that into account, the Court hasn’t been majority liberal since 1971, when William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell joined.
That hasn’t stopped the Court from evolving in a progressive direction at times. In 1973, GOP appointee Harry Blackmun authored Roe v. Wade, drawing only two dissents; from 1996’s Romer v. Evans to 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, Anthony Kennedy and the Court’s liberals steadily expanded the rights of LGBTQ Americans.
But for the most part, over the past half-century liberals have been playing defense as an organized and well-planned movement of conservatives has limited the scope of rights trumpeted by liberals, expanded the power of the state in criminal justice, and issued more business-friendly rulings on campaign finance and regulatory issues.
The Court ruled that states didn't have to give poor black and Latino school districts the same fundingas rich white districts. It ruled thatschool resegregation achieved through white flight to wealthy suburbs was just fine. It ruled that despite declaring abortion a fundamental right, that didn’t mean Medicaid had to extend that right to poor women, and then it reversed course on treating abortion as a fundamental right at all. Itstruck down the death penalty but then brought it back four years later.
And in more recent years, it’s gutted the Voting Rights Act, struck down limits on campaign donations by corporations, strangled Medicaid expansion in the crib, and for the first time in American history declared an individual right to own guns.
All that could be about to change.
