Last month America experienced the extremist right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court that rolled back a string of long-held rights & protections reinforcing the need to consider major reforms to the high court & lower federal courts. The Center for American Progress & the Brennan Center presented a panel including Sherrilyn Ifill & Michael Waldman who served on the presidential commission to study court reforms. Ifill stated, “The Supreme Court sits within our democracy, not outside of it & over it. We are supposed to be able to correct issues that we see stand in the way of our democracy being able to be as true to itself as it could possibly be.” Waldman added, “How we read the Constitution & role of the Supreme Court is properly a major political issue. Certainly, the folks who, for decades, have waged a campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade or to have the individual right to gun ownership recognized in the constitution—they understood that & we need to understand, too, that kitchen-table advocacy on the Constitution is going to be part of our debate going forward. We saw in the last few days of the term, last month, a decade’s worth of right-wing social change jammed into three days by the unelected part of the government.” Ifill added that she was particularly concerned about the court’s lack of respect for long-standing precedent in cases especially in overturning Roe v. Wade concluding, “There have to be a set of reasons & a set of benchmarks before you overrule a decision that you have made in the past, especially a long-standing decision that millions of people have relied on.”
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