Future historians may well remember 2022 as the year when the U.S. Supreme Court permanently went off the rails. This goes well beyond the tormented, quasi-religious reasoning used by the court's conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that officially reversed the nationwide abortion rights established in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. In the course of revoking women's reproductive rights, the justices also hinted they might reverse the right to same-sex marriage, and perhaps even the right to contraception. Perhaps even more consequential, the court also decided it would hear Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina case about whether state courts may strike down gerrymandered congressional maps. If the conservative majority buys into the dubious legal theory known as the independent state legislature doctrine, it will effectively empower Republican-dominated state legislatures to overturn the popular vote in future presidential elections.
Roosevelt told the nation the Supreme Court had "improperly set itself up as a third House of the Congress — a super-legislature, as one of the justices has called it — reading into the Constitution words and implications which are not there."
