... we must stop seeing urban violence as an argument to be won and instead look at it as a problem to be solved. On the right, racist blame-shifting and fearmongering must be rejected. On the left, race-based mistrust of law enforcement must be addressed. A diverse new political constituency must be created to demand practical solutions to the pressing challenge of urban violence.
What conservative activists understood long ago was the value of the myth of the apolitical judiciary—that by focusing their time and money on filling life-tenured judgeships with doctrinaire conservatives, they could disguise an unpopular policy agenda with the trappings of legal process. They could justify an unpopular decision by declaring that they are just interpreting the law. And by and large, the legal press corps has happily propagated this myth. Some two decades after five conservative justices functionally handed a contested presidential election to the Republican presidential candidate, most legacy Supreme Court reporters still treated the notion of acknowledging the justices’ partisan preferences as naïve and gauche.