The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans

The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans

Garbus, Martin. The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007).

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Legendary First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus who has represented Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, and Andrei Sakharov et al. has authored an urgent cautionary work. Proceeding from the observation by Alexis de Toqueville that in the United States political questions are almost always transformed into judicial questions, Garbus cogently makes a straight forward argument about the likely future of the United States Supreme Court.

Whereas the Rehnquist Court has prepared the way, the new Roberts Court will continue the job of reversing seventy years of American jurisprudence. The Federalist Society goon squad of Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy acting as an unelected, undemocratic elite are committed to squashing acts of Congress. The political agenda of the Roberts Court is to further limit the powers of Congress, make the states more powerful, repudiate precedent (where tactically necessary), seek a return to the halcyon days of a Lockner era laissez-faire Darwinian economics, and to put racial minorities back were they were socially and legally fifty years ago.

Garbus argues that the Gang of Five while pretending that they are “originalists,” who seek to keep the Court removed from politics, are in reality a little less than faithful (“originalists” e.g. Bush v. Gore) and a little more than political. Further, Garbus maintains that while the Supreme Court has always been political, the problem is that the Court is currently infected with the wrong kind of politics.