A Polarized Court, Weighing a Reversal of the Safety Net

Julian Zelizer, a Princeton historian and the author of a new book on the 1960s expansion of the safety net, said the closest analogy might be Reconstruction and the reaction to it. An enormous federal effort initially succeeded in expanding civil rights in the South, only to be reversed in later years. The reversal lasted decades. Reconstruction is obviously a charged, and imperfect, analogy. (For one thing, the people who would lose health insurance now would be predominantly white Southerners.) But the fact that no better precedent comes to mind underscores the highly unusual nature of what could happen at the Supreme Court.