Progressive Issue Groups Find Public Enemy No. 1: The Supreme Court

It didn’t land with the same kind of political explosion as Dobbs. But the Supreme Court’s decision last year in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency was every bit as outrageous: The six-member conservative majority, in handcuffing the EPA’s regulatory authority, had “declared war on governing,” as my colleague Cristian Farias put it at the time—and underscored, for Doug Lindner, the desperate need for judicial reform.

“We decided that that was a step too far,” says Lindner, senior director of judiciary and democracy at the League of Conservation Voters, the influential environmental advocacy group. The Court, he tells me, was “serving the interests of the polluters,” and had not only shifted too far to the right—it had become too powerful.

Lindner is hardly alone in that sentiment; he’s part of a growing recognition on the left that progress in the policy arena could be entirely undermined by an activist, right-wing court that has come to seem less like a judicial body and more like an unelected “superlegislature,” as Democratic representative Ritchie Torres put it last week. That’s why a diverse coalition of advocacy organizations—including the League of Conservation Voters—has banded together recently to form United for Democracy, which hopes to move the needle on Supreme Court reform. Stasha Rhodes, the director of the campaign, acknowledges that “it’s not an easy fight.” The Supreme Court is “broken,” she says, and Democrats can’t fix it right now without the support of the very Republicans who helped break it. But Rhodes tells me that she remains “hopeful that the momentum will turn into something.”

“Issue groups that may have been hesitant to weigh in on the Supreme Court before now understand that they don’t have a choice, because the Supreme Court impacts all of our issues, from pollution and the water we drink to safety in our communities to our most personal health care decisions,” Rhodes says of the effort, which has so far sought to build public pressure on lawmakers to act. “As we start to increase the drumbeat on this issue, and include more people outside of Washington in the conversation, I think we feel really good about our ability to move Congress in a way that they start to take action.”

The campaign—which launched in mid-June, before the conservative majority further undermined the Environmental Protection Agency; struck down Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and affirmative action in college admissions; and effectively authorized discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans—includes a number of progressive heavy hitters, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest and most influential unions in the country. The hope, for Rhodes and the groups involved, is that there will be strength in numbers—that these disparate organizations will be able to highlight, for Democratic- and Republican-leaning voters alike, the Court’s “willingness to break those traditional norms, showing that they’re too powerful, too political, and unfit to meet today’s challenges,” Rhodes explains.

“We’re not going to stand by as corrupt justices repeal our fundamental rights,” echoes SEIU president Mary Kay Henry, “while acting like the rules don’t apply to them.”

That could add to the already growing momentum around Supreme Court reform that has built up in the wake of devastating decisions like Dobbs and the conflict of interest scandals that have erupted around Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two stalwarts of the right-wing supermajority. The question now is: How can the campaign best channel that momentum? And will it be enough to actually effect change?

Legal fights have always been instrumental to movements for labor, abortion, gun control, civil rights, and beyond. But Dobbs—which overturned half a century of precedent last year in ending the federal right to an abortion—threw the Supreme Court’s outsize role in those battles into stark relief. It’s as if “there’s this one massive national veto pen, basically, in the Supreme Court, that can change or dictate our rights on a whim,” says Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications and research at NARAL Pro-Choice America.

So far, several proposals have gained traction on the left—from adding seats to the bench to imposing stricter, more common-sense ethics and transparency rules—to avoid further politicizing the scandal-plagued court. Even Nancy Pelosi—the former House Speaker who’s often at loggerheads with her progressive flank—has recently come out in favor of term-limiting justices.

But those reforms have hit a brick wall in Washington: Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues have brushed off concerns about ethics scandals and partisan rulings; Republicans have accused Democrats of mounting political attacks on the conservative majority; and President Joe Biden has so far refused to embrace major reform, even as he correctly laments that the Roberts court is “not a normal court.”

Still, popular outrage and growing activism around reform over the past year do seem to be having an impact, at least on the Democratic lawmakers who have become more assertive in their calls for Supreme Court overhauls. Meanwhile, some of the most influential issue groups in the country—including Planned Parenthood, which endorsed Supreme Court expansion, term limits, and ethics reform in May—are adding even more fuel to the fire.

To be sure, the path forward for reform is very rocky. Public trust in the Supreme Court has been at a historic low, and that has so far seemed to have little effect on the conservative justices and their Republican defenders, who have made change all but impossible in the current Congress.

Any substantive action, then, will likely depend on Democrats winning back the House, expanding their majority in the Senate, and retaining the presidency in 2024. That’s not impossible: The GOP already suffered the public’s outrage at the Court last cycle, and could pay the price again next fall. But unless and until that happens, the hope for reform will continue to butt up against the reality of a divided Washington. “I wish that Supreme Court ethics weren’t a partisan issue,” Lindner says. “Ethics never should be a partisan issue. But then again, neither should clean air, clean water, or voting rights be partisan issues, and yet here we are.”