By Mackenzie Grizzard | Staff Writer
In the final session of Baylor Libraries’ Readers Meet the Authors Series, political science and law come together with one common idea: the U.S. Supreme Court is the most powerful court in history, and it is the only institution that will protect minority rights.
Dr. David Bridge is an associate professor of political science, and his recent book titled, “Pushback: The Political Fallout of Unpopular Supreme Court Decisions” examines the importance of civil discourse from a legal perspective.
Bridge said there are several types of pushback — including grassroots, congressional and electoral pushback.
“It’s an iterative process, always going back to the political system, to people, to institutions, and that was a driving motivation behind looking at pushback,” Bridge said.
Grassroots pushback refers to dissension in local communities that express their disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling, according to Bridge. As an example, he offered the landmark case of Engel vs. Vitale from 1962, which ruled that it was unconstitutional for public schools to require students to recite a school-composed prayer.
“School prayer is the most attacked Supreme Court decision in American history,” Bridge said. “There are more attacks against school prayer than any other issue — abortion, campaign finance [or] desegregation.”
Electoral pushback is when the American people vote in ways that demonstrate disagreement with the Supreme Court, Bridge said. Despite this, Bridge explained how elections in recent years have changed what electoral pushback really means.
“Just because the Supreme Court makes an unpopular decision and there’s a group of Americans who are going to rethink the way they vote, it doesn’t mean it’s going to play out that way,” Bridge said.
Jeremey Counseller, Baylor Law dean and Abner V. McCall Chair of Evidence Law, discusses the legacy of unpopular Supreme Court rulings over the years, particularly Bush vs. Gore in 2000, where the court denied Florida’s Supreme Court request for a manual recount of ballots.
“Al Gore went on television, and he said ‘I strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision, but I respect it and I concede,'” Counseller said. “It was soaring and majestic, and we didn’t have fighting in the streets or anything over it, but to me it came down to respect for the institution.”
Bridge and Counseller both highlight several landmark Supreme Court cases over the years throughout the discussion, including the several abortion rulings that have taken up space in the minds of Americans since the early ’70s.
“So in 1973, the Supreme Court hands down Roe [v. Wade], providing guidelines for what legislatures can and can’t do with abortion [and] it’s largely perceived as a pro-choice decision,” Bridge said.
Similar to today, abortion became a hot-button issue.
“Put very simplistically, two-thirds of the country was opposed to Roe vs. Wade in 1973, and in 2022, two-thirds of the country supported Roe vs. Wade,” Bridge said. “And so there’s this opportunity for the Democratic Party to run an abortion campaign the way the Republican Party ran it for 50 years, to use the issue and its electoral pushback to win elections.”
Then comes Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, which overturned past precedent of Roe vs. Wade and 1992’s Casey vs. Planned Parenthood and returned abortion policy to the states. Based on the idea of electoral pushback, Democrats should’ve been able to win the upcoming midterm and presidential election based on the outrage alone, Bridge said, but that’s not how it happened.
“If you fix the problem in politics, you don’t get to run campaigns on it,” Bridge said. “How did they fix the problem? You’ve got red states actually allowing abortion.”
Bridge explains that for people that have voted Republican all their life, the Dobbs ruling could be one of the first times they considered abortion an important issue.
“But once their state allows access to an abortion, they take a sigh of relief, not just because they have access to an abortion, but also they can go back to voting Republican,” Bridge said.
Despite widespread dissension around abortion rulings, Bridge contends that the Supreme Court is an integral part of American politics.
“But in many ways, court rulings are what are called majoritarian, [and] they reflect the will of the majority of Congress, the president and/or the American people,” Bridge said.
With a Republican majority in the Supreme Court, Senate and a slight lean in the House of Representatives, many wonder what electoral pushback might look like in the coming years.
“You never actually win in American politics,” Bridge said. “You’re just better positioned to fight tomorrow.”
