Commentary
Three years ago, I wrote a column criticizing Chief Justice John Roberts’s obsessive preoccupation with wanting the public to regard the Supreme Court as apolitical. Ideally, of course, the Court wouldn’t be political. Its role in our constitutional order is to defend the integrity of the Constitution, to never fall under the sway of democratic passions, and to remain above the fray of partisan politics.
The goal of Supreme Court justices should never be popularity. It’s the Court’s solemn duty to rule on the constitutionality of laws. If a majority of Americans object to a Supreme Court decision, then the elected branches of government—the legislative and executive—can revise the law to bring it into compliance with the Constitution or (admittedly a far more difficult task) to amend the Constitution so that it authorizes some previously off-limits governmental power. …