While everyone focuses on its abortion decisions, the Roberts Court is merrily revoking a century of legislation protecting citizens, consumers, workers, and minorities against business. Simon Lazarus lays it all out:
When most Americans think about the Supreme Court's effect on the life of their nation, they think about such cultural hot-buttons as abortion, or due process for terrorists, or free speech and pornography. They don't think about the Court's effect on the issues that most directly affect the majority of them on a daily basis -- health and retirement security, workplace fairness and equal opportunity, consumer protection and product safety.Since these pocketbook matters do not roil culture-war sensitivities or raise constitutional questions, the press, public, and politicians pay little or no heed when they come before the Court. Nor, with few exceptions, do liberal advocacy groups -- even though landmark laws they fought to enact are at risk, and even though constituencies they purport to represent have much reason to care about how those laws will fare in the hands of the Roberts Court. Indeed, while right-wing groups still make political hay by railing at "liberal activist" judges, progressive groups often pay scant attention to the conservative-activist threat to judicially repeal the economic protections that Congress and state legislatures have enacted since the New Deal.
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
