Financial Times Editorial Comment: Supreme defeat for liberals

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Supreme defeat for liberals
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: July 8 2007 21:30 | Last updated: July 8 2007 21:30


For decades, America has shunted its really difficult social problems into the courts. Abortion and race – among the most divisive issues in US society – have been dealt with largely by judges rather than politicians. Liberals have won victories in court on those issues that they could never have won in Congress.

But now the US Supreme Court, replete with two new conservative appointees hand-picked by President George W. Bush, is no longer willing to play along. In the term that ended 10 days ago, America’s top court subtly, but profoundly, changed gears on both issues. Landmark rulings on integration in education and the right to choose abortion were silently repudiated by the court, under its new conservative leader, Chief Justice John Roberts.

Technically, nothing has happened to threaten the court’s most famous liberal precedents, like Brown v Board of Education (the 1955 ruling ending deliberate school segregation) or Roe v Wade (the 1973 opinion guaranteeing the constitutional right to abortion). But the spirit of the court has been profoundly altered. Ruling in a case involving so-called partial-birth abortion (a gruesome method for ending late-term pregnancies), the court made it much harder to challenge any state anti-abortion law. In practice, the court may have significantly restricted the right to choose – without unleashing political mayhem by overruling Roe.

Last month’s race ruling was, if anything, even more chilling: the new chief justice displayed a deep animosity to “racial balancing” plans aimed at integrating America’s still largely segregated schools. Integrating schools by race now is no better than segregating them by race 50 years ago, he said – a deep insult to integrationists.

Mr Roberts paid lip service to the court’s 2003 ruling upholding the right of public universities to use race in choosing students – but left to himself he would have gone far toward overruling it. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the mercurial conservative who holds the balance of power on Mr Bush’s new court, stopped him from doing so: but it is far from clear whether any integrationist plans will survive court scrutiny in future.

Mr Roberts and his conservative colleague, Justice Samuel Alito, promised to uphold precedent in their Senate confirmation hearings. They have done so in name only. America’s top court has moved sharply to the right. It could move even further still, if the court’s ageing liberals – Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – leave office while Mr Bush still has time to appoint their successors.