Review of "Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Details the Supreme Court's drift from left to right over the last 50 years. Demonstrates with court cases and history, but frequently ends up overstating and speculating - could have done a much better job with the material.
The first chapter sums up the liberal Warren court, touching on cases emphasizing gender and racial equality. This chapter also shows the pipeline of cases about the poor, hoping to highlight their plight and minority mistreatment - but it was not to be. The book then veers into the dirty tricks that Nixon and his cabinet used to counteract the court - known during the time as the Nixon court.
From that point on, a majority of the book focuses on loss after loss for cases involving the poor. The book repeatedly spends time speculating on "what would have happened" had Warren not been replaced by Nixon, had Fortis not been forced …
Details the Supreme Court's drift from left to right over the last 50 years. Demonstrates with court cases and history, but frequently ends up overstating and speculating - could have done a much better job with the material.
The first chapter sums up the liberal Warren court, touching on cases emphasizing gender and racial equality. This chapter also shows the pipeline of cases about the poor, hoping to highlight their plight and minority mistreatment - but it was not to be. The book then veers into the dirty tricks that Nixon and his cabinet used to counteract the court - known during the time as the Nixon court.
From that point on, a majority of the book focuses on loss after loss for cases involving the poor. The book repeatedly spends time speculating on "what would have happened" had Warren not been replaced by Nixon, had Fortis not been forced off the court. These muddy the message. At a guess, these are here to provoke the reader to anger, hardly useful in context.
Towards the end, the book dives into more recent rulings, helping prop up corporations and white collar crime, while removing restrictions on campaign spending. The outcomes here are more straightforward, and the author reduces speculation. The direction is frightening, with legal scholars and even the justices noting that an end result is a prison state - at least for the vast majority of Americans.
This book does make the case that many votes are along idealogical lines, even going as far as invoking a "constitutional doctrine that it all but made up." Far from ruling on constitutionality, the court has often used its power to shape the country without passing laws - and those actions are becoming more frequent.
The conclusion is excellent, though it brings up a direction not noted in the book. "For many conservatives, the real battleground has always been the New Deal and the way in which it vastly expanded the federal governments role in the life of the nation." While it is true that the recent court is hostile to those programs, it is hardly the job of the court to provide alternatives. Unfortunately, no president or congress will be able to create the right laws to back up vital programs like Social Security, leaving a 6-3 Court to erode them completely.
The book has 76 pages of references of the various rulings discussed, leading it to seem shorter than its nearly 450 pages. A better history with less speculation would have made this a better and more impactful narrative. 3 stars out of 5.