by Jeremy Leaming
The nation’s growing income inequality, among other issues concerning the economy, should play a significant role in the presidential election, but writing for The Nation, Ari Berman delves into why the Supreme Court should also be “a major issue in November.”
The Supreme Court is simply not balanced. The court has been shoved far to the right. Berman cites Nate Silver’s reporting for The New York Times on a recent study that “finds that the current court is the most conservative since at least the 1930s.”
The Martin-Quinn Scores, which Silver rendered in two charts, also “imply that, on the basis of its median justice, the current court is farther from the ideological center than any recent court. For instance, it is farther from
the center than the liberal courts of the late 1960s that were under Chief Justice Earl Warren.”
And beyond deciding whether health care reform will stand or fall, the Roberts Court is likely to consider a slew of major issues in the “not-so-distant future,” Berman writes. Some of these concerns include affirmative action policy, voting rights, marriage equality and reproductive rights. (As Berman notes, Republican state lawmakers have passed numerous onerous restrictions on reproductive rights over the last few years.)
The right already gets it. Leaders of the conservative movement have obsessed over the make-up the federal courts and the high court in particular, for decades. And those leaders haven’t stopped obsessing. Berman notes that NRA leader Wayne LaPierre declared, in hyperbolic fashion, at this year’s Conservative Political Action Committee, “If Obama wins re-election, he will likely appoint one – and perhaps three – more Supreme Court justices. It’ll be the end of our freedom forever.”
choed in an 
CA in its entirety, former Solicitor General Paul Clement went first claiming that the federal government is “coercing” states to accept this unwanted expansion of Medicaid. As expected, the “liberal” justices pounced on Paul Clement’s central argument. Whereas Clement seemed very