Pushback: The Political Fallout of Unpopular Supreme Court Decisions(Studies in Constitutional Democracy)

The Supreme Court has usually operated in majoritarian fashion but not always, and when it hasn’t done so, the consequences of its decisions have had an extremely important impact on the Court, political parties, party formation, and politics in general. In writing Pushback, an interdisciplinary book in an interdisciplinary series, Dave Bridge crosses methodological boundaries. Sometimes, the inquiry allows for procedural data collection with measurable observations (e.g., polls, number of congressional proposals, roll call tallies, breakdown of factional affiliations). At other times, he relies on historical narrative to describe complex stories that can only be told by attending to sequence, actors, institutions, and norms. The end result offers readers an innovative and highly accessible ways to think about the ways in which our constitutional democracy can push back against rare counter-majoritarian Supreme Court decisions.

About the Author :
Dave Bridge is Associate Professor of Political Science at Baylor University, where he teaches courses on U.S. government, public policy, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of four peer-reviewed journal articles and the coauthor of three more, as well as the coauthor of a successful textbook, Constitutional Government: The American Experience.

Review :
“This wonderful book deserves widespread attention. It is a remarkable piece of work and one that is provocative in the best sense of the word.”—Laura Kalman, Distinguished Research Professor of History, UC Santa Barbara, author of FDR’s Gambit: The Court-Packing Fight and the Rise of Legal Liberalism “Pushback offers a deep insight into the Supreme Court’s role in constructing, sustaining, and ultimately undermining the regimes students of American political development have identified. Dave Bridge argues that the Supreme Court often responds to signals from factions within a governing coalition, articulating the principles those factions believe characterize the regime they support. But, just as political time is only loosely connected to calendar time, so too is judicial time only loosely connected to political time. Sometimes Court decisions push the boundaries of a regime’s principles beyond the point where they are politically sustainable, thereby opening up the opportunity for the regime’s opponents—and potential successors—to make the Court’s decisions a focus of their campaigns: backlash, in short. Bridge applies his analysis to a range of contemporary constitutional issues, identifying those that are (and aren’t) good candidates for party-building pushback. Bridge’s provocative and important argument should become a major element in future scholarship on the Supreme Court and regime politics.”—Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law emeritus, Harvard Law School, coauthor of Constitutionalism and Its Discontents “Pushback offers the rare combination of rich history and sophisticated theory in exploring the ways in which the American people and governing officials respond to unpopular Supreme Court decisions. Scholars, political activists, and all interested readers have much to learn from Dave Bridge’s fascinating study of the successes, failures, and everything in between of political efforts to thwart judicial efforts to tell the rest of us what our Constitution means.”—Mark Graber, University of Maryland, Carey School of Law, author of Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War “(Bridge) should be commended for the excellent selection of issues and level of historical detail. This volume undeniably contributes to scholarship on the role of Supreme Court decisions in electoral politics and how political parties respond to those controversial decisions, especially in the wake of the Dobbs decision.” – Choice