In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in the anti-discrimination case involving New Haven, CT firefighters — see yesterday’s post — you are hearing a lot of Republicans and right-wing commentators praise the Court’s “respect for the law” and moves away from “judicial activism.” These conservatives are using the Court’s decision to argue against the confirmation of Sonya Sotamayor, who was part of the Appeals Court decision that the Court reversed, claiming that Sotomayor is an “activist judge.”

But don’t kid yourself. Judicial activism, if that is defined as judges overturning years of settled legal precedent and carefully considered acts of legislators, is alive and well, argues U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman (D-DE), carried out by five activists in the U.S. Supreme Court.

They are overturning decades of precedent on the narrowest of margins, 5-4, and always with the same five justices — Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy. (Hereinafter referred to as “the bloc,” just to save typing.)

The bloc turned down Lily Ledbetter’s plea to sue for sex discrimination when she found out her pension was lower because she had been paid less than men doing her same work. She didn’t know she was paid less until she retired. Too bad, the bloc said, she failed to file her case in time, even though the evidence had been kept from her. It took an act of Congress to reverse this decision by the Roberts Court. Lily never got her rightful pension.

Let’s look at some other activist decisions by the bloc.

School desegregation? The bloc, 5-4, forbade the Seattle school district from using voluntary methods of student reassignment, overturning common understandings of the Reconstruction-era amendments that were meant to protect the rights of black citizens.

Guns? The bloc, 5-4, for the first time in American history, held that the Second Amendment provides an individual constitutional right to own firearms, overturning decades of settled legal precedent.

Antitrust law? The bloc (you guessed it, 5-4) overturned almost a century’s worth of precedent about price fixing, siding with large companies against small retailers.

And there are strong hints that the four most conservative members of the bloc want to do away with the Voting Rights Act and Roe v. Wade, and are only waiting to see if they can bring Justice Anthony Kennedy along with them, as they have in all of the other cases cited above. (Kennedy has made the bloc 92% of the time.)

This context matters when understanding the Court’s New Haven firefighter decision: the Court is controlled by a highly ideological conservative bloc hellbent on using judicial activism to overturn laws and settled legal precedent that they don’t like. And given the relatively young ages of all members of the bloc (Antonin Scalia, at 72, is the oldest), we are stuck with this Court for probably a decade or more.

You can sympathize with the white New Haven firefighters. But don’t swallow the fiction that says judicial activists are on the left. In our lifetime, and for the foreseeable future, they are on the right. And on the Supreme Court.