HuffPost : Professor of law and political science at Yale and Author of Famous Books writes "The Supreme Court's War on the Twentieth Century" - The sweeping regulatory authority of Congress under the commerce clause is under attack - ObamaCare

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Under attack of Conservative Justices : ObamaCare, the Voting Rights Act, the president's power to make interim appointments to the executive branch and the New Deal in General. The Supreme Court may intensify the institutional stand-offs and unnecessary crises that are undermining the confidence of ordinary Americans in their government.

Huffington Post
The Supreme Court's War on the Twentieth Century

By Bruce AckermanProfessor of law and political science, Yale; Author 'The Decline and Fall of the American Republic', he is also the author of the multivolume series, We the People.
January 31, 2013


The Supreme Court's War on the Twentieth Century


Some excerpts :

This is the larger question raised by an escalating series of decisions, starting with the recent Obamacare case. In designing its sweeping reform, Congress relied on 70 years of case-law, emerging from the New Deal, that upheld its sweeping regulatory authority under the commerce clause. Yet Chief Justice Roberts, as well as four other conservatives, dramatically challenged this basic element of the New Deal settlement. While Roberts made a last minute doctrinal swerve on another issue to uphold the statute, this should not blind us to the dangers that lie ahead. While his act of statesmanship prevented a head-on confrontation between the presidency and the Court, the conservative majority has issued a fundamental challenge to a basic premise of twentieth century constitutionalism.

A similar challenge will arise this year as the Court weighs the fate of the Voting Rights Act. "We Shall Overcome," Lyndon Johnson famously declared in introducing the legislation to Congress in 1965. But it took more than this rhetorical gesture to transform the dreams of Martin Luther King into the law of the land. Johnson had to win the support of a broad bipartisan coalition, including Republican leaders like Everett Dirksen, for a Voting Rights Act that would actually generate real-world results when so many previous statutes had failed. Their success of 1965 has been repeatedly reaffirmed by the political branches -- most recently, when President Bush renewed the law for 25 years after it was passed 390 to 33 in the House and unanimously in the Senate. Nevertheless, the Court's conservative five-judge majority may well strike down key statutory provisions as unconstitutional.

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The Court's war on the twentieth century is not inevitable. Perhaps the Chief Justice, or one of his fellow conservatives, will execute statesmanlike swerves in upcoming cases. But if not, a runaway Roberts Court will intensify the institutional stand-offs and unnecessary crises that are undermining the confidence of ordinary Americans in their government.

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