Who Will Stand Up to the Supreme Court Justices?

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/opinion/supreme-court-voting-rights-act.html

https://archive.ph/LhoGz

Ruling by Ruling, the Supreme Court Is Undoing the Civil Rights Movement
May 2, 2026
By Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan

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If Congress does not respond, we know how this story will end. But just as we can learn from the consequences of acquiescing to the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretation, we can also draw upon the tools past Congresses have offered for how to build a more democratic constitutionalism. In that version, constitutional meaning is determined not by unelected judges but by we the people and our representatives through federal lawmaking.

Rejecting the court’s supremacy, Congress should reaffirm its own interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments by statute — as the 1862 Congress did after Dred Scott and the 1982 Congress after Bolden. Congress could declare, for example, that constitutional democracy demands a new Voting Rights Act that deploys proportional representation to end partisan gerrymandering or that rejects the unrestricted flow of money in politics. To make its interpretations stick, Congress should enact measures like those suggested by its predecessors.

As the founding generation of Republicans understood, the Constitution explicitly empowers Congress to regulate the court. By contrast, the document says nothing about the court’s claimed authority to regulate Congress. Instead, the court’s alleged authority to defy and second-guess acts of Congress has been sustained only because the American public has so far been willing to tolerate this judicial rule — a choice that can be unmade.

Lincoln understood the stakes of this choice when he warned at his inauguration in 1861 that if “vital questions affecting the whole people” are to be “irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

We must not cease to govern ourselves.

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