"Never forget that it was the Supreme Court that brought on the Civil War with its Dred Scott decision. And it was the Supreme Court that guaranteed Jim Crow would continue to exist for decades with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. And it was the Supreme Court in the Korematsu decision that had the final word on putting thousands of American citizens in detention"
That's interesting - each of your examples involves a situation where the SC failed to stop the actions of other branches or subdivisions of government. Sounds like an arguement in favor of judicial activism.
Each of those decisions I cited presents an example of the Supreme Court thinking that it knows better than the Constitution and then refusing to follow the Constitution's dictates. So each of those examples I presented demonstrates exactly why judicial activism is disasterous. In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court held that if black person who was a citizen was taken back to a slave state then he became a slave again. There was no basis in the Constitution for that decision. Likewise there was no basis in the 14th Amendment for the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that 'separate but equal' passed Constitutional muster. In Korematsu, there was literally no basis for the Court's conclusion that it was Constitutionally acceptable to hold thousands of citizens in dentention simply because they were of Japanese ancestry. And in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court had to invent a right of privacy in order to hold that abortion was a protected right under the Constitution.
With respect to your broader point that the other branches of gov't sometimes make mistakes. Yes, that is correct. The other branches make mistakes, sometimes horrible ones. But when they do, the people residing in those branches can be voted out of office. That doesn't happen though with Supreme Court justices. When they make a mistake, it is for life.