With the end of the Supreme Court’s term, Democrats are denouncing the court as ideologically motivated, extreme, undemocratic, even destabilizing. Their angst is understandable, but it’s misguided. It’s understandable because, until recently, progressives were able to rely on the court to achieve or ratify many of their most important policy goals. It’s misguided for at least two reasons. First, this court is not ideologically motivated — that is, committed to conservative outcomes. It is committed to a textualist approach that sometimes will produce outcomes that political conservatives cheer and sometimes will infuriate them. Second, Democratic warnings of a constitutional apocalypse — with the court supposedly poised to strip away Americans’ rights to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), homosexual sex (Lawrence v. Texas), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges) and other rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution — are overblown. The court is not inclined to do any such thing. Advertisement Any impression that conservatives could rely on this court for conservative outcomes was dispelled on the final day of the term. The court upheld the Biden administration’s repeal of President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. It also declined to review New York state’s vaccine mandate for health-care workers, which lacks a religious exemption. Given strong legal arguments on both sides of the “Remain in Mexico” debate, an ideologically motivated court could have found plenty of reasons to strike down the repeal. Instead, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the court’s liberals in ruling it lawful, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreeing but for a procedural point.

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