The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

This reversal was a function of the new constitutional possibilities in the Civil Rights Act. The Democrats were the party of new, court-mandated rights—of all kinds. The habit spread to both parties—to Democrats earlier than to Republicans—of promoting judges not for their impartiality but for their political reliability, including on the federal appeals courts, which are the “farm system” of the Supreme Court. From time to time throughout American history, the Supreme Court had been threatened by those who would use it as a weapon of partisan politics—over-reaching decisions in the 1850s, court packing in the 1930s. But those pressures had been episodic. The pressure the Court faced after Roe was not. Within a decade-and-a-half, this small-looking problem would begin to erode the constitutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself, and the problem would turn critical in the following century.