Conservative justices are extremely mad about people calling them out for being partisan hacks.
They’re speaking out after the Supreme Court allowed Texas to functionally overturn Roe v. Wade for now, in a harbinger of things to come.
All expectations are that the super-conservative new SCOTUS will either completely overturn Roe or gut it after they hear Dobbs v. Jackson, a case custom-built for their arguments for taking away women’s right to an abortion, in December. The fix is in, people are saying so, and the hacks aren’t happy about it. How dare we mortals criticize them? So they’ve taken to given speeches whining about how people see the court as partisan, since they’re acting as partisans. It turns out having a lifetime appointment does not preclude you from having extremely thin skin.
The whining started with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who opened her speech at the McConnell Center, where she was introduced by Mitch McConnell, by saying “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Right, and the representatives of the Empire, speaking at the dedication of the Death Star, want you to know they’re not agents of the Dark Side.
“The media, along with hot takes on Twitter, report the results and decisions,” Barrett continued. “That makes the decision seem results-oriented. It leaves the reader to judge whether the court was right or wrong, based on whether she liked the results of the decision.” Personally, if I had the most powerful job in America for the rest of my life, I would log off and not give a shit about Twitter hot takes, but that’s just me.
Amy Coney Barrett.
Timothy D. Easley/AP/Timothy D. Easley/APBarrett is not the only justice who’s mad about being called what she is. Justice Clarence Thomas, who once went an entire decade without asking a question, has suddenly become very vocal, whining that “the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference. So if they think you are anti-abortion or something personally, they think that’s the way you always will come out.” Of course, that’s exactly when he’s going to do.
Thomas sounded a little defensive and maybe that’s because his wife recently had to apologize for cheering on the Capitol rioters and telling her Facebook followers that she “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” Normal, totally non-partisan stuff.
“They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician,” Thomas said. We do!
“That’s a problem,” he continued. And it is!
“You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions,” he warned, not seeming to realize the “you” there is him.
Nothing sounds more like a politician than someone claiming to be the opposite of what he is, and scolding others for the things he’s doing himself.
A few weeks after that, Justice Samuel Alito also spoke at Notre Dame, to offer his own dose of gaslighting about the shadow docket the Supreme Court used to functionally overturn Roe, for now in Texas, and which is being wildly overused by this Supreme Court of escape accountability for their political, partisan, and terrible decisions.
Don’t take my word for it. Justice Elena Kagan said of the shadow docket, after Alito and his hack pals used it to upend abortion rights with one paragraph issued in the middle of the night, that “every day [it] becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.”
But Alito said he was speaking to “dispel some imaginary shadows,” complaining that, “This picture is very sinister and threatening, but it is also very misleading. There is nothing, absolutely nothing new about emergency applications.”
Then Alito put the gaslight on full blast to whine that, “The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its way. And this portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”
He might want to talk to Kagan about who is responsible for this portrayal. The call is coming from inside the court.
A Gallup poll last week showed that public approval of the Supreme Court has “hit a new low” since they started asking about in 2000—and 2000, you’ll recall, was the year the court’s conservatives made up some mumbo-jumbo to make George W. Bush president. No one trusts these liars, and rather than act with some modesty and actually make rulings that show they’re not just politicians they want to give bullshit speeches whining about how they’re misunderstood, just like politicians would.
It’s almost as if the American people don’t want to be ruled by a group of installed partisans, including three who were slammed into lifetime appointments by a twice-impeached president who didn’t even win the popular vote and one of whom is in the seat that Mitch McConnell snatched from Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland without so much as a vote.
What gets me is that these conservative hacks in robes are furious that people don’t like what they’re doing, but instead of doing something else they just want to lie about what they’re doing. I wish they were a little more worried about what the women who will die during back-alley abortions think of them rather than the media, but what do I know? I’m just a member of the media.
