Good Monday evening and happy New Year. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions.
2022 was a bad year for the Supreme Court, writes law professor Andrew Koppelman. It "threw away an opportunity to ameliorate the toxic polarization of America."
Instead, the court "has become perhaps the most politically extreme and partisan court in American history."
Koppelman says he was impressed by the "intellectual quality" of President Trump's three appointees to the high court and had "hoped that they would understand the delicate position they were in and would act accordingly."
But Koppelman has been bitterly disappointed. He reviews some of what he sees as the court's most egregious decisions from last year — from overturning federal abortion rights and blocking efforts to guarantee voting rights to a general sympathy to a libertarian philosophy that appears nowhere in the Constitution, especially when it comes to addressing climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the past, the court's conservatives seemed to understand the balance necessary between the guarantee of religious liberty and the Constitution's prohibition from government sponsored religion.
But alas, that understanding has been nowhere to be found since conservatives became a majority on the court, argues Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University.
Koppelman notes that the court garnered the lowest public approval rating in its history in 2022, and that the justices seem alert to their diminishing credibility.
He argues that Justice Amy Coney Barrett "was right that it is important for the country not to think that the court is a bunch of partisan hacks." But he adds, "The best way for them to keep the public from thinking that is to stop making it true."
Read Koppelman's column here.
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