The Supreme Court's latest term delivered seismic rulings that will reshape American life for millions. Decisions cascaded across voting rights, immigration policy, and birthright citizenship, each one rewriting the rules that govern fundamental aspects of how people live.
The scale of the court's reach raises a fundamental question: how did nine justices accumulate this much power in the first place?
Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for the Nation, argues the answer lies in how the court's authority expanded far beyond what the framers intended. The institution has grown into something that now touches nearly every corner of American law, often with little restraint.
More pressing to Mystal is whether reform is even possible. Court expansion, term limits, and other structural changes face steep political obstacles. Yet Mystal contends these fixes are not merely good policy, they are constitutionally sound. The Constitution, he argues, does not forbid restructuring the judiciary, and the current imbalance demands it.
The term's rulings illustrate why the stakes matter so acutely. Decisions on voting access and citizenship status are not abstract legal questions, they reshape who gets to participate in American democracy and who belongs. When the court reshapes those questions without democratic input, the legitimacy of its own power becomes the real story.
Reformers face an uphill battle against institutional inertia and political polarization. But Mystal sees the current court as unsustainable in its present form, a body with outsized influence and insufficient checks. Whether Congress will act remains an open question, but the pressure to do so keeps mounting.
Author James Rodriguez: "The court remade America this term, and nobody voted for it. That's the problem reform advocates can't ignore."
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