SCOTUS has no police or armies to enforce its edicts. The institution functions entirely on "trust capital." Every time it strikes down some democratically-instituted law, it uses up some of that trust capital. Sometimes, it must spend that capital. But doing it too often erodes faith in the institution, and ultimately, that is the only thing they have.

I'd argue that Citizens United is a great example of that in action. In my opinion, the Court got the law absolutely right in that case. But they used up a lot of trust capital in the process.

SCOTUS has far more than faith. It derives its powers from the constitution, and a constitutional amendment would be needed to destroy it, not merely a lack of faith, and until its destroyed it has the ability to set precedent and make rulings. To say it has no police or armies is simplistic as well, once departmentalization of constitutional interpretation starts occurring, you have a divided nation on the path to civil war. The thought that there wouldn't be Americans willing to take up arms in solidarity with supreme court rulings, and with SCOTUS rulings as their justification is rather naive.

The only time the executive has ignored supreme court ruling I believe was when Lincoln was in charge, and well, to say the nation was divided at that time would be an understatement.

> The SCOTUS shouldn't wait on consensus. They don't need that. They need to decide if it is legal or not.

This is a really bad idea, you're basically describing an oligarchy. The Supreme Court is really a consensus-enforcing machine, for the most part.

Congress is not supposed to be a consensus-enforcing machine. The Supreme Court is supposed to make sure the words of the Constitution and the words of the laws mean something. If they don't, then the country is ruled by people, not by laws.

There's nothing wrong with oligarchy. It's better than mob rule.

The Supreme Court is a literal oligarchy - it's 9 people who are accountable to no-one. The Senate is a more democratic body, since they can be held to account by voters.

I don't know if this was meant to be a joke but it's rather preposterous. Justices do not make laws, they interpret and apply them, and must do so while being rationally bound and yes accountable to laws and precedent under the framework of common law. Judicial activism is a pejorative term for good reason: they're not there to create or destroy laws. If they did start abusing their power to interpret laws they would be impeached: they actually ARE accountable to congress same as the president.

Also, if the equal protection clause was misinterpreted by the judicial branch, the legislative bodies of the federal and state governments have the power to revise and make it clear that the law was never to be interpreted that way.