ABSTRACT
Robert Bork's new book, Shucking Toward Gomorrah, contains a surprising suggestion: a constitutional amendment allowing Congress to override any Supreme Court decision by a simple majority vote of both houses. He calls the court "despotic," which is not the right word for the giant shadow that the court now casts over normal democratic politics. Chances of getting an override established here by amendment are currently around zero. Bork thinks the court is basically an instrument of the intellectual class: the law schools, the academy, the foundations, the media, the arts community, the left activists. Sometimes the court strays from the script, as in the current waffling over affirmative action and racial gerrymandering. Opinion at the law schools, which are increasingly devoted to freewheeling judicial activism, matters a lot to the court. The court has developed the sad habit of creating linguistic sinkholes in its decisions that can be cited later to justify even further out rulings.
