1) Historically Carrol is partly right -- for example, the Wagner Act, for a while barring federal labor injunctions, was a great victory that helped the labor movement start to regain its feet in the 1920s.
The idea that the courts on on our side was fostered by the anomalous eras of the New Deal Court, which was essentially a minimalist Court that stood aside and let the New Deal happen legisdlatively and administratively, and then the more activist Warren Court, which ended legal segregation, created the privacy rights, and extended the rights of the accused. Warren Court politics persisted to a lesser degree through the Burger Court years, partly becaise of continuity of personnel, partly because it's hard to chip away a lot of precedent. Anyway, there has been maybe forty years when for one reason to another the federal courts have been more or less on the right side -- 35-48 (the New Deal Court), 53-69 (the Warren Court), 69-86 (the Burger Court),
2) Nonetheless it matters a lot who's on the bench. Never mind the difference between Warren, Brennan Marshall, Black, Goldberg, Fortas, and Douglas (the core of the Warren Court of the 60s) and Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and O'Connor -- the core of the Rehnquist Court. The difference between O'Connor and Scalia, between a moderate conservative and a stone reactionary, is immense in practical terms.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > Yikes. This guy is bad news.
>
> The obsession of many leftists with the SC is a
> holdover from the days
> of the Warren Court, a period which everyone should
> have known wouldn't
> last. SC-dependence became addictive, and leftists
> simply have to work
> on curing that addiction.
>
> The courts are not a friend of the people. They
> never have been except
> for very short and periods and by accident.
>
> Carrol
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