This was your court, John Roberts
SCOTUS-watcher Dahlia Lithwick comments on the dilemma in which the Roberts court finds itself. Choose your clichéd metaphor: painted itself into a corner, hoisted on its own petard, shot itself in the foot, chickens coming home, etc.
Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife are just one court soap opera. The fact that conservative funders expend lavish sums to sustain the pair in the style to which they’ve become accustomed makes it clear that both the Federalist Society and SCOTUS conservatives believe justice goes to the highest bidder.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot for engaging in insurrection is on its way to D.C. Thomas will surely not recuse himself from that and other Jan. 6 cases involving players with which his spouse Ginny is closely aligned. This is an imperial court, Lithwick writes, and conservative justices don’t care that we know:
Also in the coming months, with public mistrust for the integrity and character of some of the justices at record lows, the justices will have to help the public understand why they should be trusted to engage in sober, principled deliberations of thorny questions when reporting shows that at least some of them take 10 minutes to read 98 pages, that decisions in major cases are ends-driven and political, and that a couple of them are more than willing to distort the record to cover up for that fact. In the coming months, the public will have to sit with the fact that Justice Samuel Alito told Wall Street Journal opinion writers that the court is untouchable by Congress and with the fact that when the Senate sought testimony from the chief justice last year he just refused to show up. And the public will have to just get really comfortable with the fact that this imperial court thinks that kind of thing is fine.
Chief Justice John Roberts has taken care to oversee his legacy on the court, just not very well, as the previous paragraph suggests. What the “amicus brief industrial complex” has sown, etc.
For years, some of the most vocal critics of the court’s ethical lapses, its lack of transparency, and its refusals to take seriously its own brokenness and errors, have warned that the day would come when an election would be decided by a body that has refused to clean house and has blamed the press and the academy for the stench of its own illegitimacy. The worry wasn’t that the court would decide the election; that seems almost inevitable. The worry was that the public, grown weary of the stench, would not abide by their decision.
… When the hyperpolitical supercharged Trump cases catch up with the court—and that is beginning to happen, right now, this week—all that stench will run headlong into the questions about why the husband of the woman who went to the pep rally for the insurrection and the folks who lied to us all about Dobbs are objective enough to decide the outcome of an election. The same people entrusted with the protecting the reputation of the court have blundered into being wholly responsible for protecting democracy. Not one thing suggests they will take the latter any more seriously than they took the former.
“Late-stage capitalism” is another cliché, one native to the left internet. We are where we are as an unhappy society because laissez faire policies promoted since the time of Reagan (or before) have enabled capitalism’s worst instincts to flourish. The driver, what once was called movement conservatism has reached its logical conclusion and, like a cancer, now threatens to kill the host republic that sustains it.
Underlying that movement are imperial impulses far older: feudalism, monarchy, or worse. Some people still yearn for a king. They’ll settle for a dictator.
Happy Hollandaise!
