Adam Liptak’s new “Sidebar” column in the New York Times discusses a new paper of mine, End of the Dialogue? Political Polarization, the Supreme Court, and Congress.  From the column:

This sort of back and forth works only if Congress is not paralyzed. An overlooked consequence of the current polarization and gridlock in Congress, a new study found, has been a huge transfer of power to the Supreme Court. It now almost always has the last word, even in decisions that theoretically invite a Congressional response.

“Congress is overriding the Supreme Court much less frequently in the last decade,” Richard L. Hasen, the author of the study, said in an interview. “I didn’t expect to see such a dramatic decline. The number of overrides has fallen to almost none.”

The few recent overrides of major decisions, including the one responding to the Ledbetter case, were by partisan majorities. “In the past, when Congress overturned a Supreme Court decision, it was usually on a nonpartisan basis,” said Professor Hasen, who teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

In each two-year Congressional term from 1975 to 1990, he found, Congress overrode an average of 12 Supreme Court decisions. The corresponding number fell to 4.8 in the decade ending in 2000 and to just 2.7 in the last dozen years.

“Congressional overruling of Supreme Court cases,” Professor Hasen wrote, “slowed down dramatically since 1991 and essentially halted in January 2009.”

Tracking legislative overrides is not an exact science, as some fixes may be technical and trivial. And there may be other reasons for the decline, including drops in legislative activity generally and in the Supreme Court’s docket.

But scholars who follow the issue say that Professor Hasen has discovered something important. “Particularly since the 2000 elections, there has been a big falloff in overrides,” said William N. Eskridge Jr., a law professor at Yale and the author of a seminal 1991 study on which Professor Hasen built his own. “It gives the Supreme Court significantly more power and Congress significantly less power.”