NEW YORK TIMES Editorial: …The court’s conservatism calls to mind the defiance of the court in the 1930s when it regularly struck down New Deal statutes during the Great Depression. But there are important differences. The 1930s court saw itself as preserving established precedents and principles. The Roberts majority does not have that conservative role. Nor does it play the role of the 1960s court, whose rulings reinforced a relatively liberal trend in politics.
The current conservatives are not preserving a tradition or articulating a new social consensus. Instead, as the legal historian Robert W. Gordon put it, they have regularly been radical innovators, aggressively stepping into political issues to empower the court itself.
The majority took that approach this term in the politically charged fields of union governance and campaign finance regulation. In a union dues case, it broke a court rule by deciding an issue that was not presented in the case and went out of its way to take the side of right-to-work laws, which have been the subject of bitter political debate. On campaign finance, it overturned the Montana Supreme Court ruling in favor of the state’s anticorruption law without hearing oral argument or considering a substantial factual record. In doing so, it extended to state campaign finance regulation the Citizens United ruling, which allows corporations and unions to spend freely in elections, the Roberts court’s most devastating decision… (more)
