The Republican Supreme Court is squandering what remains of its authority

The U.S. Supreme Court won't block a Texas law that allows private individuals to sue to enforce a ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy – before many women are even aware they're pregnant. The law went into effect Wednesday, September 1.

It's the most restrictive abortion law in the country, imposing a huge burden on women without the means or money to travel to another state where later abortions are legal.

It's also a sign that the Republican-appointed justices, who now hold six of nine seats on the Court, are ready to overturn the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, striking down anti-abortion laws across the nation as violating a woman's right to privacy under the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.

Last week the Court held that Biden's moratorium on evictions was illegal. A few days before, it refused to stay a lower court decision that people seeking asylum at the southern border must remain in Mexico until their cases are heard – often subjecting them to great hardship or violence.

What links these cases? Cruelty toward the powerless.

The U.S. Supreme Court won't block a Texas law that allows private individuals to sue to enforce a ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy – before many women are even aware they're pregnant. The law went into effect Wednesday, September 1.

It's the most restrictive abortion law in the country, imposing a huge burden on women without the means or money to travel to another state where later abortions are legal.

It's also a sign that the Republican-appointed justices, who now hold six of nine seats on the Court, are ready to overturn the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, striking down anti-abortion laws across the nation as violating a woman's right to privacy under the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.

Last week the Court held that Biden's moratorium on evictions was illegal. A few days before, it refused to stay a lower court decision that people seeking asylum at the southern border must remain in Mexico until their cases are heard – often subjecting them to great hardship or violence.

What links these cases? Cruelty toward the powerless.

Sitting not far away from him was Thurgood Marshall – who succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, and who did more than person then alive to break down the shameful legal edifice of Jim Crow.

Today's Supreme Court majority is a group of knee-jerk conservatives whose intellectual leader (to the extent they have one) is Samuel Alito, perhaps the most conceptually rigid and cognitively dishonest justice since Chief Justice Roger Taney.

Five of today's Supreme Court majority were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote; three of them by a president who instigated a coup against the United States.

The authority of the Supreme Court derives entirely from Americans' confidence and trust in it. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers 78, the judiciary has "neither the sword" (the executive branch's power to compel action) "nor the purse" (the Congress's power to appropriate funds).

The Court I was privileged to argue before almost fifty years ago had significant authority. It protected the less powerful with arguments that resonated with the core moral values of the nation. Americans didn't always agree with its conclusions, but they respected it.

Today's cruel and partisan Supreme Court is squandering what remains of its authority. It is also imposing unnecessary suffering on those least able to bear it.