…from Cornell law professor Michael Dorf:

the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court has largely completed its mission of transforming federal law. Consider the following changes:

• Before 2008, there were no individual rights under the Second Amendment. Since then, the Court has found a constitutional right to possess handguns in and out of the home, and this Term it is poised to extend that constitutional right to include semiautomatic rifles.
• For almost half a century after 1973, there was a constitutional right to abortion, albeit one subject to pre-viability regulation since 1992. Since 2022, the government has been free to regulate or ban abortion, subject only to the highly deferential rational basis test.
• From 1978 to 2023, colleges and universities could use race-based affirmative action if they considered race as a plus-factor rather than via a quota. Now, such programs are essentially banned.
• For more than nine decades after 1935, Congress was permitted to create independent agencies headed by commissioners who could be dismissed only for good cause. As of this year, the president has the constitutional power to dismiss agency heads at will, subject only to an ad hoc exception for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
• A 1984 decision summarized many years of practice and gave its name to the principle that courts should defer to expert agencies’ reasonable construction of unclear statutory language they are charged with enforcing. As of 2024, such deference is impermissible as inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act (which had not been relevantly amended) and maybe even the Constitution.
• From the nineteenth century, it was generally understood that principles of separation of church and state forbade government funding of religious activities. By 2002, the Supreme Court had loosened the constitutional rules to permit such funding if part of a general grant program. Since 2022, the Court has held that inclusion of religious actors in such general grant funding is constitutionally required.
• From the American Revolution, when the erstwhile colonists threw off monarchical rule, no one was above the law. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution expressly affirms that any officer subject to impeachment, including the president, can be prosecuted (“the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law”). Constitutional text notwithstanding, that proposition ceased to be true in 2024, when the Court gave current and former presidents absolute immunity for acts performed in the scope of their core powers and effectively absolute immunity for all other official acts.

Some of these decisions are much worse than others, but the overall picture is ugly. The only solution will be to appoint additional “judges” to the super-legislature who will make different political choices.