Adam J. White reviews Supreme Inequality by Adam Cohen

‘Supreme Inequality’ Review: The Meaning of Justice: Framing the Supreme Court’s duties in terms of economic inequality—and criticizing the court for failing to do what might reduce it. Mr. White is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an assistant professor at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University.

Excerpts:

"Mr. Cohen omits the biography of the modern justice who experienced poverty more acutely than any of his colleagues: Clarence Thomas. (A just-released film documentary, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” recounts his upbringing in vivid detail.) Admitting no connection between Justice Thomas’s impoverished childhood and his view of constitutional equality—a view at odds with the one in “Supreme Inequality”—Mr. Cohen saves mention of the justice’s biography for a late chapter on cases involving unions, asserting that “Thomas had little sympathy for society’s downtrodden,” and suggesting that Thomas held “a grudge against labor unions” that “supported Anita Hill and opposed his confirmation.”

The chapter on unions is titled “Workers,” but Mr. Cohen prefers unions to workers. In Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (2018), the court declared that the First Amendment protects public-sector employees from being forced to fund unions’ political agendas—a win for millions of workers whose paychecks were being docked by union leaders. After Janus, Mr. Cohen reports, “4.8 million workers were instantly given the right to not pay at all” for unions they had not joined. He doesn’t mean this as a compliment; so much for workers’ rights.

Janus, like Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and other cases striking down laws that Mr. Cohen would leave alone, were grounded in specific constitutional guarantees, especially in the First Amendment. Citizens United judged certain restrictions on independent political expenditures to be an abridgment of the speech rights of unions and corporations. Yet Mr. Cohen criticizes such decisions with minimal analysis while pining for a court that, with much less constitutional basis, would nullify a host of state laws.

A “different set of blueprints would have built a different society,” Mr. Cohen concludes. The blueprints he prefers are not the Constitution’s original meaning but progressive activists’ modern agenda. But some progressives know better. In a 2001 interview, Barack Obama rejected suggestions that the Warren Court should have announced broader economic rights. The court “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society,” he said, because “the court’s just not very good at it, and politically it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.”"