![]() ![]() But the House bill would require one state to recognize another state’s marriage. The court could still issue a decision allowing states to stop performing same-sex marriages. As a result, the courts have tended to dominate federal politics by default.īut after the court’s abortion decision in June contained language that looked like it could threaten same-sex marriage rights, House Democrats were quick to propose a marriage bill that would overrule any future court decision. ![]() More recently, however, Congress has been too polarized and deadlocked to act on court decisions. ![]() The law was an explicit response to a Supreme Court ruling against Ledbetter. Congress took this approach with civil rights beginning in the 1980s, including with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which made it easier for workers to sue for wage discrimination. ![]() When the court repeals a particular law, Congress can often pass a new law that is written differently and accomplishes many of the same goals. “You try to persuade, and when you do, the country follows you.” And that’s what you do through democratic politics, if you want it to be a democracy,” Kramer said on the Ezra Klein podcast recently. “If you want a better government, you have to take an active part in shaping it. At the federal level, Congress has more powers to overrule court decisions than many people realize. At the state level, progressives still have an opportunity to protect abortion rights as long as they can convince enough voters - as happened in Kansas this week. In any case, the founders did not envisage the court as the last resort in American politics. But under the current court, it will no longer work. This tactic worked under the liberal Supreme Court of the 1950s and 1960s, and sometimes even under the more conservative court of recent decades. They have instead relied on courts to win victories for civil rights and other policies. Larry Kramer, a former dean of Stanford Law School, argues that many progressives have made the mistake of paying relatively little attention to this strategy in recent decades. They contain the basic tools of democratic politics: winning public opinion and winning elections. Some options are quite radical, like changing the size of the court or passing a law declaring that any issue is barred from Supreme Court scrutiny (both, to be fair, happened in previous centuries). ![]()
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