Eradicating the ‘Fourth Branch’

The recent constitutional revolution at the Supreme Court is the result of a well-coordinated effort over many decades by the conservative legal movement, which has achieved the reversal of a number of high-profile precedents that it excoriated for more than half a century. After the Court’s 2025–2026 term, it’s fair to say that this revolution has reached the end of its beginning. In its first phase, the Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, banned race-based affirmative action in higher education in 2023, and ended so-called Chevron deference to federal agencies’ interpretation of ambiguous legislation in 2024, allowing courts to reverse, for example, long-standing environmental regulations. This year the Court completed the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, permitting what had long been considered unlawful racial gerrymandering by deeming it constitutionally protected partisan gerrymandering. Then it empowered the president to fire executive branch officials, with the exception of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, for any reason, no matter what laws Congress has made to protect the independence of federal agencies.All these decisions were bad. All were both predictab...