The High Court Has Spoken—And the Left Won’t Listen: A Reckoning for Progressive Legal Strategy

[AustinLiberator]

By David Crockett | The Austin Liberator

The United States Supreme Court has spoken—clearly, forcefully, and repeatedly—and the message rings like a liberty bell across the land: the progressive legal agenda is out of step with the Constitution, and the courtroom is no longer the sanctuary it once imagined.

In United States v. Skrmetti, the Court upheld Tennessee’s prohibition on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. Just days later, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, it affirmed the rights of parents to shield their children from school-sponsored instruction on sexuality and gender ideology. These rulings follow a pattern of recent defeats that liberal legal architects have suffered—repeatedly and predictably—before the highest tribunal in the land.

The last several terms tell the tale:

• In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, returning the issue of abortion to the states and rejecting the notion that the Constitution contains a sweeping right to elective abortion. This decision represented the most significant reversal of liberal jurisprudence in decades.

• In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), the Court ruled in favor of a high school football coach fired for praying on the field, reaffirming First Amendment protections for religious expression even within public institutions—another sharp rebuke to those who would erase religion from the public square.

• In Carson v. Makin (2022), the Court held that Maine could not exclude religious schools from a tuition assistance program. This followed Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), where the Court similarly found that states cannot bar religious schools from public funding on the basis of their faith.

• In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023), the Court protected a Christian website designer’s right not to create wedding websites for same-sex marriages, reaffirming the primacy of free speech and artistic autonomy over compelled ideological conformity.

• In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Court dismantled race-based affirmative action in college admissions, declaring that equal protection under the law demands race neutrality—not racial engineering.

• In Biden v. Nebraska (2023), the Court blocked the President’s unilateral student loan forgiveness plan, declaring it an unconstitutional usurpation of congressional authority.

Each of these rulings has been decried by liberal commentators as radical. But in truth, they reflect a consistent judicial philosophy: fidelity to the text and structure of the Constitution. The Court’s majority has shown restraint—not activism—in restoring constitutional boundaries that were long blurred by prior decisions.

Liberal activists might decry the outcomes, but the root of these defeats lies not merely in the composition of the Court—though that is undoubtedly consequential—but in a deeper strategic failure. As Atlantic columnist Molly Hosie recently observed, these were “unforced errors”: legal challenges brought hastily, without a firm foundation of precedent or likelihood of success. In doing so, progressive litigators handed the conservative majority a chance to make national law—and they took it.

This is not how prudent legal minds operate. When you bring a case to the Supreme Court, you do so with the understanding that your issue may be settled for a generation or more. It is the last battlefield, not the first skirmish. Yet the modern left continues to drag culture war battles into a court that it neither controls nor persuades—and the results have been predictably disastrous.

The Founders, in their wisdom, did not establish the judiciary to be a legislative echo chamber. Nor did they intend the Court to enforce the moral theories of a passing age. It is a guardian of the Constitution—nothing more, and nothing less. And in that role, today’s Court is proving more faithful to its original purpose than many of its recent predecessors.

The lesson here is not for conservatives—who, for now, have the wind at their backs—but for liberals, who must rethink how, and where, they fight. The courts are not playgrounds for policy fantasies. When the law is not on your side, the wiser course is persuasion—through legislatures, through civic institutions, and through the democratic process. One does not win by charging uphill into cannon fire with a paper shield.

America is a republic, not a judicial oligarchy. And for those who wish to shape it, the surest tools remain the ballot box, the town hall, and the written word—not courtroom gambles doomed to fail.

If liberals wish to halt their losing streak, they would do well to remember the ancient political principle: you cannot legislate from the bench when the bench does not belong to you.