Our Constitutional Court

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The Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case ranks with the woeful economy, the Tea Party and other forces that brought about tumultuous change in the recent elections. The case may prove more significant in the evolution of the court’s role in American law.

The ruling is the most dramatic recent example of how differently this court is functioning compared with its predecessors — and how the distance between it and them seems to be growing. With rare exceptions, the court gets to choose the cases it wants to hear. Over the past generation, it has whittled its docket by about half, leaving appeals courts as the courts of last resort in all but a tiny fraction of federal cases.

The Supreme Court continues to address cases where the decision turns on the intricate interpretation of a single word in a statute or regulation. But increasingly the cases that most engage the justices and that matter most to the court are about interpreting the Constitution and its allocation of power.

In Citizens United, in which the court unleashed corporate, union and other money into electoral politics, the majority overturned a century of precedent that it had twice recently reaffirmed. It did so by moving past the limited controversy that was actually in the case and deciding a sweeping issue of constitutional law that no party had raised for the justices to consider.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/opinion/23tues3.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a211