Further, the objections of the population have nothing to do with the judicial branch and everything to do with the legislative branch. The courts are not and have never been democratically elected entities.
But then I saw Samuel Alito commenting just today about how the first amendment does not give Americans, and college students specifically, the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre. The fire in a crowded theatre standard was overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). So it’s a little odd to hear that the Schenck interpretation from fifty years earlier is back on the menu.
I find myself wondering how that happened. What’s the fine distinction between interpreting the law differently to precedent and ignoring settled law?
According to Wikipedia that standard was explicitly upheld as the example of speech that would be prosecuted.
Alito claimed* that the 'fire in a crowded theatre' standard should be applied to today's college campuses, essentially because he has strong views on how free speech should/shouldn't be regulated at college. It seems to me that he's taking issue specifically with the right of students to engage in political speech and protest. The current court seems to have a particular distaste for case law from the civil rights era. I think he's deciding to bring this exact issue up because he wants to signal to any prospective plaintiff what rulings and precedents the court is likely to focus on in a hypothetical case. But he did that by deliberately misapplying the relevance of a widely-known and easily-misunderstood civil rights-era standard. It feels like he's doing that to taunt his political opponents and signal his preference for an earlier legal regime.
My point is that it's fair to question whether the court is actually behaving like a legislature: it's concentrating on case law that specifically affects social policy and it's doing that because it has a majority's muscle. As a foreigner, I can't explain how insane this looks from outside. Judges don't get to just show up to cocktail parties or speeches and single out the precedents they'd prefer to ignore or dispense with. That's a politician's job.
* https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/justice-alito-takes-di...
P.S. minorities here could mean anything i.e the mega rich, the “legal” cartels, etc.
Abusing any population, is abusing a population. What you just argued is akin to walking into a room full of pregnant high school girls, and declaring one to be the "most" virgin.
Besides, the point of the Constitution, is to make it difficult for such things to happen in one direction or another in the political dimension. Which it does pretty well. If you want it to provide protections in the dimension of private economic activity, you can do that, just make an amendment and build a consensus.
If this new amendment which you draft to ostensibly protect this "majority", can't build the requisite consensus, then not only is it doubtful that it actually protects a majority, but it also shouldn't be an amendment. That's just democracy since the "majority" you claim to be serving doesn't seem to want the amendment.
