WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 11: Exterior view of the U.S. Supreme Court building prior to a roundtable discussion on Supreme Court Ethics conducted by Democrats of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at the R... WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 11: Exterior view of the U.S. Supreme Court building prior to a roundtable discussion on Supreme Court Ethics conducted by Democrats of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on June 11, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Court Accountability) MORE LESS

This likely goes without saying. But I’ll say it anyway and add a few points. The occasional non-terribly ruling by the corrupt Supreme Court doesn’t reduce the necessity of reform one iota. I’m not as wound up as I might have been by the anti-constitutional and frankly absurd independent agency ruling only because it was telegraphed so long in advance. (ICYMI, the Court ruled that the president has the authority to fire civil servants, unless they work for the Federal Reserve. More from Kate Riga on that here). I call the ruling absurd only because of what I guess we need to call the as-yet-tact “sound money” doctrine which makes the Fed somehow different from every other independent agency because of the more general “because” doctrine.

What I want to note here is what is semi-taken for granted even by many who despise the Court’s corruption. And that is the way it is more or less assumed now that any law, prohibition, or imperative assumed or embraced by Democrats goes up for review by the Court as though it were some kind of Guardian Council or perhaps more aptly an upper legislative house like the House of Lords. Of course judicial review is not new. That goes back 225 years. Key pieces of New Deal legislation were overruled by the pre-Carolene Products Court. And you have the entire Lochner era in which the Court held that most of what we would now call garden-variety regulation was unconstitutional.

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