Historically, when big collisions between public opinion and the Supreme Court have occurred, the justices lose and the public gets its way. That is because, as Abraham Lincoln put it a few years after the justices decided the infamous Dred Scott decision, which deprived Congress of authority over slavery in the territories, “If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”