By Ruth Marcus, Deputy editorial page editor
January 21, 2022
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern states launched a campaign of massive resistance to school desegregation. Today, a version of massive resistance is again playing out, this time to the court’s ruling in the Texas abortion case — and this time, the resistance is coming from within the judiciary itself.
Worse yet: In the years after Brown, the court made clear that it would not tolerate any disobedience of its desegregation ruling. By contrast, in the weeks since the court allowed a limited challenge to the Texas abortion law to proceed, the conservative justices have shown themselves unwilling to enforce even that weak edict.