Stuck with a lousy Court

In case you haven't noticed, there is a hierarchy in the US which is protected by the Supreme Court.  For the Court, we are primarily a white country.  When it comes to the American people, non-whites have been given lower legal status and different treatment by the Court over the years.

In general, the people of America of are given a lower status than are their institutions and those institutions' economic activities, though more powerful and wealthy individuals have tended to maintain more legal clout than their less moneyed brethren.  Corporations are more important "persons" than the rest of us, and are given considerably more clout than our government. 

It's hard to not to conclude that conservative justices are wary of even the slowest and most basic social progress and work actively to discourage it. 

According to James McGregor Burns, liberal historian and political scientist, the Court has been packed for over a century and a half -- packed against the interests of the individual and minorities.  Burns calls the Court "a choke point for progressive reform" with only the Earl Warren Court an exception that rule. 

There is little which is even-handed and disinterested about the Supremes, contrary to our fond misperceptions.  As Michiko Kakutani writes in a recent review in the Times:

Instead, Mr. Burns says, the recipients of “beneficent decisions from the United States Supreme Court” in the post-Civil War years were entrepreneurs and corporations, who benefited from the justices’ eagerness to abet the country’s economic expansion. He writes that all of President Ulysses S. Grant’s appointees “were railroad attorneys” and that during the 1880s “a flock of major railroad cases arrived” at the court’s doorstep, and that in general, a philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism and “economic liberty” informed the court’s decisions.

He argues that with the 1895 case United States v. E. C. Knight Company, the court drastically narrowed “the scope of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, which had been hailed as the first federal effort to regulate the huge monopolistic corporate combinations that were rapidly forming,” and that the court went on to frustrate many of Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts at reform, remaining wed to what Mr. Burns calls a “long outgrown economic philosophy.”

Indeed, Mr. Burns states that the principle of lifelong tenure has “produced a critical time lag, with the Supreme Court institutionally almost always behind the times”; since 1970, he notes, the average tenure of justices has increased to more than 26 years.

“Justices throughout the court’s history have clung to their seats long after their political patrons have retired,” he observes, “and long after their parties have yielded to their opponents or even disappeared. They have often perpetuated ideologies and attitudes that are outdated or that Americans have repudiated at the ballot box.”

As a result, Mr. Burns concludes in this tough-minded book, “too often the Supreme Court has seemed to be fighting the progress of history.”

A proposal to limit the term of a Supreme Court justice to 18 years has surfaced. I'd vote for that.