Worst Supreme Court decisions in Two Decades

What’s the worst thing the U.S. Supreme Court has done in two decades?

Bush v. Gore? The very name evokes tragedy.  Thousands dead in Iraq for a war we shouldn’t have fought. Thousands more dead in Afghanistan because the Supreme Court’s choice for president sent military support to Iraq instead. The Court’s presidential choice also encouraged savage, predatory business behavior that we’re still paying for. It put off any reckoning with the environment for a decade, more if you include the House of Representatives’ current intransigence.

That’s quite a record for a single U.S. Supreme Court decision. You might have to go back to Dred Scott v. Sanford which helped bring on the Civil War to match the impact of Bush v. Gore, although if we go back that far, disasters you’ve probably never heard of, like U.S. v. Cruikshank and the ironically named Civil Rights Cases, were responsible for a century of murder and mayhem with impunity in the segregated south. But Bush v. Gore certainly ranks with the biggest – and worst.