Supreme Court Conservatives Try to Outrun Public Backlash
The new majority is essentially deciding cases while they are still before the lower courts, and that doesn’t sit well with Chief Justice John Roberts.
Some common ground.
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images
We live in a world where the Supreme Court is poised to give conservatives huge wins on abortion, guns and affirmative action. The popular passions over those issues make it hard to interest the general public in the conservative majority’s far more subtle and gradual efforts to change the way the court does its business by essentially deciding cases that are still before the lower courts.
Yet that change matters. It tells you a lot about how the conservative majority is thinking about the next few years and its strategy to change the direction of the law beyond the big-ticket cases that make headlines.