The New Era of Rightwing Judicial Supremacy: The U.S. Supreme Court concludes its most recent term with a bang, not a whimper.

• Author: Blum, Bill

In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton famously predicted that the judicial branch of government would "always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them." In retrospect, Hamilton could not have been more wrong.

The U.S. Supreme Court is now dominated by five hardcore ideologues--three of them nominated by former President Donald Trump. In its most recent term, the court made a mockery of Hamilton's forecast of judicial restraint, crossing a variety of political fault lines on abortion, the Second Amendment, "religious liberty" and the separation of church and state, climate change, civil rights, campaign finance, and voting rights (see sidebar). Far from the neutral institution envisioned by Hamilton, the court has become, according to many commentators, a quasilegislative body dedicated to advancing a regressive political agenda free from democratic accountability.

Welcome to the new era of rightwing judicial supremacy.

The court's power grab reached new heights last term with its landmark abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which concerned a Mississippi statute that bans almost all abortions after fifteen weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Dobbs delivered on the right's long-festering fever dream of reversing Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the twin pillars of the federal right to abortion.

Alito declared that both Roe and Casey were "egregiously wrong from the start" because the word "abortion" doesn't appear anywhere in the first eight amendments to the Constitution, or anywhere else in our national charter. He also pontificated that abortion cannot be considered an implied or "unenumerated" fundamental right under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause--as Roe and Casey both held--because it is not "deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition." As a result, he concluded, the court was free to overrule Roe and Casey--decided in 1973 and 1992, respectively--unconstrained by the doctrine of stare decisis, which holds that judges should adhere to precedent.

Instead of respecting precedent, Alito reached deep into the bowels of Anglo-American common law to override it. He cited, among other sources, the work of Henry de Bracton, a thirteenth-century English cleric...