In the Dead of Night, the Supreme Court Proved It Has Too Much Power (Jamelle Bouie)
"...The court’s abuse of the shadow docket is in that category: actions that threaten to place the rule of men over the rule of law. It’s not that the court is political — that is to be expected — but that its conservative majority is acting in arbitrary, secretive ways, with hardly any justification other than its own power to do so. Antifederalist opponents of the Constitution feared that the judiciary’s expansive power would consume all others: “This power in the judicial will enable them to mould the government into almost any shape they please,” wrote “Brutus” in a January 1788 essay. The majority in the Texas case, three-fifths of it appointed by President Donald Trump, seems intent on proving Brutus’s point. (The Antifederalists, for what it’s worth, often had a point.)
One last thing. In his first Inaugural Address, delivered almost four years to the day after the court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, Abraham Lincoln warned that “if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then the people “will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”
The shadow docket aside, the extent to which political outcomes in America rest on the opaque machinations of a cloistered, nine-member clique is the clearest possible sign that we’ve given too much power to this institution. We can have self-government or we can have rule by judge, but we cannot have both."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/texas-roe-supreme-court.html
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