Other branches surely can do grievous harm, and have: tolerance of slavery for decades; failing to head off the Great Depression; 58,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War; and countless missteps on taxation, education, debt, infrastructure and other vast swaths of policy. But the Supreme Court’s accretion of power—steady, subtle, unstated—produces its own danger. We have come to expect from the Court what it should not deliver. And in turn we demand even less from our democratically chosen representatives.
