They got their jobs for LIFE….
They see the law the way THEY want to…..
And they are as political as anyone else…..
And there are only six judges that are united against the 535 lawmakers serving in Washington…..
And they hardly can get together to do much of anything these days….
Unlike in the past when Congress HAS overriden bad or wrong court rulings….
The answer to the Alito 5 isn’t more judges….
It IS a Congress that does its job and gets around the 6 human beings that are dead set on taking this country backwards…..
But thanks to legislative gridlock, Congress very seldom responds these days to Supreme Court decisions interpreting its statutes — and that means the balance of power between the branches has shifted, with the justices ascendant.
The consequences have been especially stark in Supreme Court rulings on global emergencies like climate change and the coronavirus pandemic, but the phenomenon is a general one. Congress has largely fallen silent as a partisan stalemate has gripped Capitol Hill, aggravated by the increased use of the filibuster, which has blocked almost all major legislation in an evenly divided Senate. The upshot is a more dominant court.
It was not always so.
“If you go back to the ’80s, every time the court did something Congress didn’t like, they passed a law,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard. “It was an iterative process between Congress, the agencies and the courts.”
Congressional inaction following Supreme Court rulings on statutes is not especially new, but it has taken on added importance as the court has veered to the right and is increasingly insisting on clear grants of congressional authority to executive agencies. In addition to the ruling on climate change, the court has recently declared that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not authorized to impose a moratorium on evictions and that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was not authorized to tell large employers to have their workers vaccinated against Covid-19 or undergo frequent testing.
Congress is, of course, powerless to revive a law that the Supreme Court has struck down as unconstitutional. In such cases, the court gets the last word, and only a constitutional amendment or a later overruling can undo its work….
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“In the ’70s and ’80s, Congress was passing major legislation all the time,” said Bruce Huber, a law professor at Notre Dame. “When something was wrong, there was a real colloquy between the court and Congress. The court would say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.’ And Congress would come back and say: ‘You’re right. We’ll fix it.’ And the very next session, you’d get a major amendment to the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act.”
In what the authors of a 2014 study called “the golden age of overrides,” Congress overrode 86 Supreme Court statutory decisions in the eight-year period starting in 1991. Since then, the study found, “there has been a very significant falloff.”….
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But if recent practices are any guide, congressional action is unlikely.
Consider the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which invited a congressional response that the justices must have known would not be forthcoming. The decision, which effectively gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, did so indirectly, by striking down the law’s formula for determining which states and localities were covered by the law’s requirement that changes to voting procedures be cleared by federal authorities.
“Congress may draft another formula based on current conditions,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. Congress has not enacted a new formula.