This is part of Amicus and Slate’s “By the People” series, which explores how the American people can reclaim the Constitution—and the law—from this monarchical Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s reputation is at an all-time low, and for good reason. It just wrapped up one of the most consequential terms of the modern era, in which it dismantled voting rights, overturned one precedent after another, and ruled against some of America’s most vulnerable populations with seeming ideological glee. Half the country now disapproves of the court; a little more than one-third of voters approve of the job the justices are doing. And about three-quarters of Americans support Supreme Court term limits. Even the court’s final hurrah, the narrow striking of President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, seemed to satisfy no one.

This term has also revealed the profound philosophical mismatch between the court and the public. Conservatives, for their part, seem to see the justices as nothing more than a set of robed servants for their political projects. To these folks, the justices are not umpires there to call balls and strikes, as Chief Justice John Roberts once described them. They’re instead batters, and their job is to swing and hit a perfect 100 percent at bat for the party that appointed them. Take the Republicans throwing a pity party about Justice Amy Coney Barrett siding with Roberts and the Democratic appointees on birthright citizenship. With a straight face, conservatives are treating Barrett, the deciding vote for overturning a constitutional abortion right, as a secret liberal. To put it in the words of the founder of the conservative legal group the Article III Project, Republicans “just want dumb justices who will fall in line.”

As cynical as this is, the Supreme Court has given the GOP every reason to expect this level of conformity. It has bent the laws in ways that have shrunk the line between law and politics to an almost invisible sliver. Matters that make their way to the court each term read more like political wrestling matches than ordinary cases, like Republican National Committee v. Democratic National........

© Slate