What some people miss when they’re bemoaning the new tendency of opposition parties to vote against Supreme Court nominees is that the Supreme Court has become another branch of Congress. What can’t be done in Congress is now done by the Court. It was the inability of Congress to end Jim Crow that started this trend, but the Roe v. Wade decision put it on steroids. Republicans know they can’t ban abortion so long as the Court says it is a constitutional right, so they are laser-focused on filling the Court with anti-choice conservatives. They’ve already succeeded in getting a court conservative enough to gut the McCain-Feingold bill, to rule against equal pay for equal work, and so on. The Court is “activist” because it’s now set up to legislate on issues where Congress either cannot act or is unwilling to act. If we got rid of the filibuster, we could resolve most of these issues.