U.S Supreme Court seems no longer interested in ‘the common good’

This U.S. Supreme Court is bent on expanding its own powers at the expense of the executive and legislative branches. In doing so, it risks throwing the legal system as we know it into chaos, thereby undermining its role in promoting the “common good.”

In a major ruling at the end of June, the high court took an ax to the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely on their own interpretation. By a vote of 6-3, the justices overruled the landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Under what is known as the Chevron doctrine, if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable.

Those seeking to curtail what they termed the “administrative state” argued that courts, rather than federal agencies, should say what the law means. They prevailed. In overturning Chevron, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded, “It thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”

The “agency” could be the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Toxic Substances, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration or any of a vast number of agencies staffed by people with, literally, decades of formal science and technology education and training, as opposed to judges with, on average, none. A July article in Climatewire stated that overturning Chevron will make it make it more difficult (as if it weren’t already difficult enough) for the administration to defend its efforts to address climate change — an existential threat to humanity.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a decision that continues to rile Americans on both sides of the issue. This decision is consistent with where the court is heading with Chevron. The court decided it will be up to each state to decide how the health of a woman, that of her baby and even her life should be considered in justifying a decision to terminate a pregnancy. So, here again, science takes a back seat to jurisprudence.

Not even the “soft sciences,” such as history, are immune from proctoring by the court. With the 2022 Bruen decision, the majority ruled that the courts were America’s firearm history experts. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, wrote that for a firearm regulation to be justifiable, “The government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition,” going back practically to the founding of this country.

Those of us concerned with America’s crisis of gun violence took some solace in the court’s Rahimi decision, in which it found, “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.” The immutable Thomas dissented, writing, “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.” That is, no one was taking guns away from abusers in 1791.

On Monday, the court decided that a U.S. president has absolute immunity in the exercise of his “core constitutional powers.” What I find maddening is the court’s failure to decide whether Trump has “presumptive immunity” for the other acts he took in conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. It makes me wonder, as Pope Benedict XVI asked, “By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved?”

The Supreme Court volleyed the case back to the lower courts, where they can debate the issue, including what is definitive about “presumption,” until the election either makes the question moot, or all the Sturm und Drang over the result will be muted.

I presume that even then we will be asking: What has this court done for the common good?