You Can Have Democratic Self-Government or the Corrupt Court — Not Both

It’s a good day to return to the question of the Supreme Court’s corruption and the necessity of reforming it in order to make democratic self-government possible again in the United States. The federal Constitution is an expansive document. Within the system begun with Marbury v. Madison — a system certainly subject to many reasonable critiques — it is possible to have more liberal or conservative jurisprudences, more activist or restrained courts, loosely tethered to the progress of presidencies and senates. The Roberts Court is a different beast. It is the product of a decades-long effort to corrupt the federal judiciary. That degree of corruption first came into full view in the second decade of this century when the Court openly began to do three closely interrelated but conceptually distinct things.