Yes, democracy survived, and that’s a good thing. But to settle on that theme is to miss the point of a term that was in many respects the capstone of the 18-year tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts. To understand today’s Supreme Court, to see it whole, demands a longer timeline.
On gun rights, the court was maintaining a decades-long silence despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s public call in 1997 to revisit the Second Amendment and the George W. Bush administration’s startling advice to the court five years later that the federal government was ready, for the first time, to support the individual-right position on the ownership of firearms when an appropriate case arrived.
That was how the world looked on Sept. 29, 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the oath of office, less than a month after the death of his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist. And this year? By the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it. To miss that remarkable fact is to miss the story of the Roberts court.
Justice Neil Gorsuch was candid about this in a concurring opinion last year when the court limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants. The major questions doctrine, he explained, “applies when an agency claims the power to resolve a matter of great ‘political significance.
Her lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom, a hard-right Christian litigating group, asked the court to decide whether Colorado’s law prohibiting businesses from discriminating against L.G.B.T.Q. people violated either Ms. Smith’s right to freedom of religion or to free speech. The court agreed to hear only the speech question.
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