The Supreme Court is a supreme threat to American democracy. That was Abraham Lincoln’s view in light of the Dred Scott decision, expressed in his First Inaugural Address. And it was vividly illustrated after Lincoln’s assassination, when the Civil War amendments and civil rights legislation passed by Congress were effectively nullified by the Supreme Court, enabling former Confederates and other white supremacists to destroy the possibility of multiracial democracy for almost a century. “Our democracy suffers when an unelected group of lawyers take away our ability to govern ourselves,” as Harvard Law professor Nikolas Bowie wrote in 2021, based on his testimony before the do-nothing Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
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Mitch McConnell’s court-packing scheme and Donald Trump’s appointments have succeeded in dramatically undercutting Americans’ people’s capacity for self-government and the promotion of “the general welfare” promised in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
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“We didn’t want this to just be a lecture series,” Coleman added. “Court reform should be something that’s built by the people. Part of this project is thinking about how we end judicial supremacy, how we make sure that the people have power, and not just unelected, unaccountable judges.
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