Undoing a Supreme Court Policy mistake…..

What happens when the Supreme Court gets it wrong?

Misguided court decisions have altered the path of the nation in sadly demonstrable ways. And the question arises again from the series of sharply divisive rulings by the current court.

The short answer is: Not much can be done. In the American system, an edict from the high court is almost uniquely without check or balance. When justices err, the people suffer the consequences.

The only corrective is the high court itself, as future generations reconsider once-settled doctrines. But problems often get worse before they get better, because Supreme Court errors are rarely one-offs. When a cabal of justices goes astray, they tend to keep on going. Mistake follows mistake, and the boundaries of American freedom get squeezed.

Mistakes are, of course, in the eyes of the beholder. The current court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade wasn’t unwelcome to the sizable minority who oppose abortion rights. In their eyes, the Roe precedent was the mistake. But a more rigorous assessment awaits. There have been many high-court rulings that, while comforting to supporters, look abominable, even unconscionable in the fullness of time — cases that few rational jurists, left or right, would ever try to defend.

Taken together, the judicial errors of the past paint a tragic, almost mournful, picture of the court’s role in American history. Eugenics. Forced sterilization. Racial segregation. Internment for citizens based on ancestry.

“In our governmental system, the Supreme Court, on constitutional questions, is infallible, though, as everyone knows, no one of its members comes within sight or sound of infallibility,” averred Justice David Brewer, who served from 1889 to 1910.

Brewer knew what he was talking about, because he sat with a group of justices who were far more conservative than the nation they served. Their decisions damaged American life for generations, denying the government the power to combat the economic excesses of the Gilded Age while giving the imprimatur of the highest law in the land to discrimination and segregation….

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