“We are writing a rule for the ages,” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch declared this year during oral arguments in Trump v. United States. Little did the country know then that Gorsuch’s statement was more than a prediction; it was a threat. On Monday, the court’s conservative majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled that the president has at least presumptive immunity for all official acts and absolute immunity for “the exercise of his core constitutional powers.
The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 rejected the contention that the 13th and 14th amendments allowed Congress to outlaw racial discrimination. And most infamously, the court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that the 14th Amendment granted nonwhite Americans only legal, not social equality — a standard that it declared satisfied by the perverse doctrine of “separate but equal.