Never Ending Battles

A terrific article by Haley Sweetland Edwards about how the passage of progressive legislation is always the beginning, rather than the end, of policy struggles. Particularly when it comes to the federal judiciary, this is something that too many Democrats have been slow to grasp. Contemporary liberals are right to have leaned the lesson that there are only very limited circumstances in which litigation can produce progressive social change, but it doesn’t follow from this that staffing the federal judiciary should be a low priority. Courts can do a great deal of damage to progressive legislative victories.