Former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration member: SCOTUS has gone off the rails.

[pnwmom]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/opinion/supreme-court-conservatives.html

The Reagan revolution pitted itself against “activist” judges who were seen as following personal whims by altering the law and creating rights not found in the Constitution. Through interpretive tools like textualism and originalism, the Reagan lawyers sought to make the law more predictable and steady — as articulated by John Roberts, the job of justices was “to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

That revolution, however, has morphed into what it was meant to curtail, as the expanding right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has relied on an array of innovative constitutional rights to undermine traditional governmental actions while discarding longstanding precedents with which they disagree.

In the highest-profile case of the court’s new term, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the conservative justices may be ready to repeal the constitutional right to abortion.

At the same time it seems ready to cast aside certain constitutional rights, the court today regularly gives sweeping new interpretations to other rights and invokes them to radically narrow certain government powers that were until quite recently uncontroversial, including, for example, powers related to public safety or our democratic process.

Donald Ayer, a former U.S. attorney and principal deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. He helped lay the groundwork for it, so fuck him.