How McCutcheon Could Come Back to Haunt the Republican Party

By Peter Beinart, The Atlantic

When my kids were younger, I loved to roughhouse with them. For a while, we’d all have fun. But then I’d get tired and want to stop, only to realize, to my dismay, that they were just getting started. I’d created something I could no longer control.

Something similar sometimes happens with political parties and the Supreme Court. In the early decades of the 20th century, conservative Republican presidents appointed conservative Supreme Court justices who went on to strike down chunks of the New Deal. For Republicans, this turned out to be a problem. To adapt to a political environment transformed by the Great Depression, the GOP needed to stop rigidly opposing federal intervention in the economy. But the Supreme Court wouldn’t stop, and Franklin Roosevelt shrewdly used the justices as his political foil. Republicans had created something they could no longer control.

A few decades later, something similar happened to Democrats. In the 1950s and 1960s, Democratic (and some Republican) politicians appointed justices and lower-court judges committed to expanding civil liberties and civil rights. But by the 1970s, American politics had shifted to the right. Democrats suddenly needed to show they were tough on crime and respectful of traditional morality. Judges, however, kept pushing a liberal agenda, thus giving Republicans ammunition to use against their Democratic foes.

(More here.)