The Supreme Court has, in this term’s conduct and rulings,
established a new C.I.A. —
Characterized by its
Corruption
Ignorance
&
Arrogance
And by virtue of its conduct and rulings, it no longer deserves the title it held for two and a half centuries. No longer a Supreme Court. It has become
A SUPEMACIST Court
— Not in the traditional “White Supremacist” sense of the term (though the Court’s disemboweling of the Voting Rights laws of the 60’s surely has a noticeable whiff of that particular stench about it);
— Nor a “Christian Nationalist Supremacism” that seems to have infected the Court’s Creative v Elenis ruling in favor of a Christian baker’s purely hypothetical fears (she did not even have a website at the time) supporting her right to refuse to offer wedding cake design services to LGBTQ couples.
Rather it is the Court’s JUDICIAL SUPREMACISM that arrogates to itself — or, more precisely to just its Six Right-Wingers — Absolute Power to impose its ideological doctrines on virtually every aspect of American Life.
As Leon Leo and his fellow Ultra Extremist Judicial Activists in the Federalist Society have understood for decades, the structurally Anti-Democratic nature of our Constitutionally-dictated Judicial Branch makes, for all intents & purposes, a Coup staged by a Junta of just Six individuals in Black Robes possible. What’s worse, once they have seized power, they are virtually invulnerable — free of all the legal, ethical & moral restraints that all others in government are subject to — as Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito so proudly and shamelessly reveal. Power-Hungry Colonels & Generals in third world nations around the globe can only look on in envy.
In consolidating their power, this six member Judicial Junta has attacked two potential obstacles to their absolute rule: Governmental Agency Expertise; and past Court norms such as Stare Decisis and the Shadow Docket.
The Court’s six Right-Wing zealot majority reveals its trademark blend of Arrogant Ignorance in its June 28th Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ruling — which is a broadside attack on the technical & scientific expertise of Federal Agencies.
Thus, as Amy Howe writes in her SCOTUS blog:
“In a major ruling, the Supreme Court... cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely on their own interpretation of [Federal] law…. By a vote of 6-3 the justices overruled their landmark 1984 decision in “Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council [which required a court] to uphold an agency’s reasonable interpretation of a statute….
….Roberts rejected any suggestion that agencies, rather than courts, are better suited to [interpret] ambiguities … even when those involve technical or scientific questions that fall within an agency’s area of expertise..”
Or as Jeff Spicolli — had he been a Supreme Court Justice — might have written in concurring with Roberts:
“Relax, all right. My Old Man is a television repairman. He’s got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.”
- “FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH” [1982]
The Court in its Corrupt, Arrogant Iignorance is the Spicolli of our times.
The disastrous consequence of the Raimondo ruling was clear when what is effectively a Judicial Junta of Six displayed the same combination of arrogance and willful ignorance in relying
on their own interpretation of Federal Law to overturn the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives’ prohibition of bumpstocks which allow semiautomatic rifles to mimic the firing capabilities of a machine-gun, like the ones used to kill 58 and wound more than 500 concert goers in Las Vegas October 1, 2017.
Just as it did in its overturning Chevron, in Raimondo the Judicial Supremacist Junta of Six again turned its back on an Agency’s technical-scientific expertise to, instead, indulge their own Arrogantly Ignorant Bias.
And while the Court used the technical issue of “standing” to delay outlawing the abortion pill Mifepristone until after the November election, Kavanaugh’s opinion allows a future challenge to the Federal Drug Administration’s scientifically grounded approval of wider access to the pill (and even, as Clarence Thomas argues, the use of the 1873 Comstock Act to prosecute and imprison those using the US mail to access any kind of abortion care medication).
The Judicial Junta of Six has not only systematically attacked and undermined respect for technical-scientific expertise, they have also undermined the norms of Court practices and process. In the Dobbs decision which ended the protections granted by Roe, the Six overturned Stare Decisis which illustrates this “norm-busting.”. For while the history of the Supreme Court is replete with past examples, as Melissa Murray & Kathrine Shaw point out (“Dobbs and Democracy,” Harvard Law Review Jan., 2024), that required them to overturn the canonical formulation of the Court’s approach to Stare Decisis articulated more than 30 years earlier in Casey — including the admonition that “a decision to overrule should rest on some Special Reason over and above the belief that a prior case was wrongly decided.”
However, In order to justify the overturning of Roe, the Six realized they would have to first rewrite (ie, destroy & replace) the rules governing Stare Decisis which, in short order, they did. From there it was a short— shameful — leap to undoing the fundamental right American women had for half a century.
Here as in other Practices & Processes Norm-Busters the Six reach into the Autocrat’s bag of tricks to begin with the Ends they desire and work back to any and all means necessary to achieve them.
Nor is this the only norm-buster designed to satisfy the desired ends through employing any means necessary. The “Shadow Docket” soon became a favorite “ends justify the means weapon in the Six’s arsenal. This was expressed in the explosion in the frequent — more than twice as often as previously — (and repurposed) use of the “Shadow Docket” — which occurred after Gorsuch, Kavanaugh & Coney Barrett joined the court. No longer for Emergencies, new cases on Gerrymandering, Pandemic health rules, Environmental regulations all received opaque short — Very Short Indeed — shrift (naturally favoring extremest rightwing positions) — often in a single paragraph without benefit of oral arguments and lacking even an explanatory opinion.
But then you don’t need to hear both sides or offer a rational explanation if you are the Junta of Six.
Undue haste might serve an Autocratic purpose, but so too, under different circumstances, might delay. The seven months, from Jack Smith’s initial request in December, 2023 that the Court rule on Presidential Immunity, to its very-last-day-of-the-term ruling today (July 1,2024) is the Six’s judicial version of a Filibuster that Mitch McConnell could be proud of.
Once again, a Corrupt Arrogantly Ignorant Judicial Autocracy has employed all means necessary to achieve their predetermined ends.
If there is any comfort — though cold it may be — to be found in where American finds iitself today, it is in the hope provided by the sad history of autocratic juntas around the world which ultimately, inevitably fall.
In our case that fall may begin with our election of Joe Biden and a Democratic Senate & House.
Let us begin.