Supreme Court's Conservative Supermajority Functions as Unelected Policymaking Body
One year after Dobbs, critics argue the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority has abandoned its role as constitutional check and begun legislating from the bench, overriding decades of precedent without democratic accountability.
The Supreme Court's six-justice conservative majority — seated through a sequence of contested Senate confirmation processes, including the 2016 blockade of Merrick Garland's nomination and the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett eight days before the 2020 presidential election — used its lifetime tenure to reverse nearly 50 years of reproductive-rights precedent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The decision removed a federally enforceable right to abortion, with immediate effect in states that had enacted trigger laws, falling disproportionately on people who cannot travel to access care.
The structural problem is judicial supremacy without accountability. Unlike Congress, Supreme Court justices face no elections, no enforceable term limits, and — until the Court's voluntary code adopted in late 2023 — no binding ethics rules. When the Court overturns precedent on abortion, curtails Voting Rights Act enforcement, or narrows agency authority under the major-questions doctrine, it produces durable policy outcomes answerable to no constituency and reversible only by constitutional amendment or the Court itself.
Concrete harms are already recorded: abortion bans enforced in over a dozen states, rollbacks of Clean Air Act regulatory authority following West Virginia v. EPA, and narrowed federal voting-rights protections following Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. Proposed correctives in circulation — Court expansion, 18-year rotating terms with Senate confirmation, binding ethics legislation — each carry their own structural tradeoffs, but the underlying accountability gap the Dobbs anniversary has made visible is real and documented.
Original source — excerpted
news The Supreme Court isn't acting as a check on Congress. It's acting like a Congress."June 24 marked one year since the Supreme Court, in the landmark Dobbs case, overturned Roe v. Wade, shockingly reversing almost 50 years of precedent to strip ..."