The supreme court, thank heaven, finally adjourned on Thursday, after a week of decisions that blew up much of the framework of American policy and politics. And a key thing to notice about that assault on American norms was how many of their targets were adopted in a few short years in the 1960s and 1970s.
Roe v Wade, of course, dates to 1973, the fruit of many year’s work by committed feminists. Thursday’s attack on the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gases guts the Clean Air Act, which in its strong form dates from 1970 – indeed, both that law and the EPA itself were the result of the first Earth Day protests in April of that year, which drew 20 million Americans (10% of the country’s population in those days) into the streets demanding action. Even firearms sanity, badly weakened once more in last week’s decision on concealed carry permits, reached its zenith in 1968 with the passage of the Gun Control Act in response to the assassinations of that turbulent year.
