Now Supreme Court Justices Are Trolling Us That Their Decisions Are Not Political

Supreme Court Justices who live in the rarified air of “the ivory tower” of the U.S. Supreme Court are elitists who genuinely believe that their own shit doesn’t stink. They are among the most out-of-touch political actors in the American democratic system because they are unelected and serve lifetime appointments. They almost never have contact with the average American citizens over whom they hold the power of life and death over their lives. Justices are accountable to no one but their God.

The Justices should be embarrassed and feel shame for trolling the public with nonsense like this (they are not): Party politics don’t play a role in Supreme Court decisions, Barrett and Breyer argue, alternate headline, Justices say Supreme Court split by philosophical — not partisan — differences, but timing works against them:

Two Supreme Court justices are attempting to convince the public that the divides on the court are a result of differing judicial philosophies, not partisan motivations.

From the right:

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, making her most visible public remarks since being confirmed to the court last year, told a Kentucky crowd Sunday that the justices do not take partisan outcomes into account when deciding cases.

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she said, according to a report in the Courier-Journal. Instead, she said, competing judicial philosophies control the way the justices look at the legal issues before them.

More: Jennifer Rubin analyzes How Amy Coney Barrett might know she’s a political hack. “So are Barrett and Breyer simply lying to us? I would suggest it is something more insidious: They have convinced themselves that their judicial “philosophy” is neutral, rather than a means to turn the court into an instrument of partisan power.”

But the setting for Barrett’s remarks prompted immediate blowback on social media: She was talking to guests at an event marking the 30th anniversary of the opening of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

McConnell pushed for Barrett’s confirmation even as voters began voting to deny Trump a second term. He said her confirmation was the capstone of his efforts to make the federal judiciary more conservative, including the confirmation of three Supreme Court justices nominated by Trump.

McConnell introduced Barrett at the event, and praised her for not trying to “legislate from the bench” and for being from “Middle America,” noting that the Notre Dame law graduate is the only current justice who didn’t attend Harvard or Yale.

The pushback was swift. “If Justice Barrett wants the Supreme Court not to be seen as partisan, she should avoid being hosted by a center named after the most partisan person in America,” said Gabe Roth, leader of a Supreme Court reform group called Fix the Court.

“There’s value in members of the high court speaking to audiences outside of Washington, but that concept is corrupted when stretched to rationalize appearing at events that look and sound like political pep rallies,” he said in a statement.

Barrett said the public perception of the court is driven by media accounts of its decisions. [Blame the media, just like her boy Donny.]

“The media, along with hot takes on Twitter, report the results and decisions. . . . That makes the decision seem results-oriented,” she said, according to the Courier-Journal report. “It leaves the reader to judge whether the court was right or wrong, based on whether she liked the results of the decision.”

From the left:

Meanwhile, Justice Stephen G. Breyer continued a book tour in which he, too, has evangelized that the justices are not “junior league” politicians but are deciding cases based on the way they look at the law.

He was asked about Barrett’s remarks in an interview on Washington Post Live with columnist David Ignatius.

“I do agree with what I think the approach is that she’s taking there,” he said. “You know, as I’ve said, it takes some years, and you then gradually pick up the mores of the institution. And the mores of the institution — you’re a judge, and you better be there for everybody, not just the Democrats, not just the Republicans.”

But Breyer acknowledged that the court is divided in many high-profile cases and noted especially a recent decision allowing Texas’s restrictive abortion law to go into effect while legal battles continue.

“I did think it was very wrong, and I wrote a dissent,” Breyer said. “The dissent gave my reason, and the timing wasn’t very good for my book [oh, boo-hoo] because it’s pretty hard to believe in a case like those that come along that we’re less divided than you might think, but here we are. Sometimes people, as I did in that case, do feel pretty strongly, and then you’re not going to get compromise.”

As in other interviews, the 83-year-old Breyer declined to talk in detail about the unprecedented pressure he has received to retire so that President Biden can appoint a successor while Democrats are in control of the Senate.

He has said he will take into consideration his health, which appears good, and other factors, including how it would affect the court.

“When I’m ready to announce something, I will,” he said, adding: “I’m the one ultimately responsible to myself, and so when I retire is when I made the decision. I have to be convinced that in my own mind, I am doing what I think is the right thing to do, both for the court and for myself.”

But wait, there’s more!

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer continued his media interviews to coincide with the release of his new book. On Sunday, Breyer was interviewed on Fox News Sunday and once again refused to give any hints of when he might retire. Justice Stephen Breyer: “I Don’t Intend to Die on the Court”:

“Do you agree with Scalia that a justice who is unmindful of the politics of the president who replaces him is a fool?” Chris Wallace asked the 83-year-old justice. Breyer responded: “I don’t intend to die on the court. I don’t think I’ll be there forever.”

Excuse me? I’m sorry, but I have known several individuals who died suddenly and unexpectedly, as I am sure many of you have. They didn’t intend to die – it just happened. The arrogance of Justice Breyer’s statement is informed by scripture:

Ecclesiastes 9:12 (KJV) For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

All of this was just too much for Chris Hayes. As his guest Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick says, “this is straight up trolling.”

Ed Kilgore explains, Partisanship Put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. Now She’s Against It.

On one level, I suppose, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is as entitled as her senior colleague Stephen Breyer to talk sanctimoniously about the purity of heart that goes into every ruling and opinion by every member of that august bench. But the circumstances of Barrett’s remarks (as reported by the Associated Press) on the subject of the perception of the Supreme Court as partisan make them especially gag-inducing: “Barrett said the media’s reporting of opinions doesn’t capture the deliberative process in reaching those decisions. And she insisted that ‘judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.’”

On this last claim, it’s more than a little germane that Barrett was speaking at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, the legacy institution of the hyperpartisan wire-puller who introduced her, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Ol’ Mitch, of course, is the proud author of the scheme that politicized the Supreme Court confirmation process to an unprecedented degree: the refusal to act on former President Barack Obama’s March 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland.

It’s also relevant that Barrett accepted two lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary from former President Donald Trump, the great scofflaw, who was more nakedly political and transactional in his treatment of judicial nominations than any president in history.

[So] Barrett should leave the pious remarks about judicial independence to others, or at least deliver them at a time and place where she risks being struck by lightning for hypocritical self-righteousness, which is an abomination to the Lord.

Matt Ford adds at The New Republic, The Shared Delusions of Amy Coney Barrett and Stephen Breyer (excerpt):

One thing is clear: The mission to cast the Supreme Court as apolitical and nonpartisan remains bipartisan. It is also a folie à deux of sorts: a madness shared by at least two on either side of the high court’s ideological divide. Rather than take their word for it, we might ask these esteemed jurists: “Sorry, but who exactly do you think you’re kidding?”

What, pray tell, do Breyer and Barrett mean by “political”? If that merely means “involved in politics,” then yes, the Supreme Court is obviously and inescapably political. It plays a significant role in shaping policy at every level of American governance to some degree. The high court’s rulings can substantially alter American life: Look no further than the court’s decision earlier this month to block the Biden administration from enforcing a nationwide eviction moratorium; or its rulings on abortion rights and marriage equality over the past few years; or its rulings on civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, more distantly.

If you define “political” as “aligned with one of the two major parties,” however, then perhaps the more accurate term is partisan. I have some sympathy when justices insist that their work is misrepresented to the public. Liberal and conservative justices alike have noted that the court actually resolves most of its cases on unanimous or nearly unanimous grounds, and that while there are a number of 5–4 decisions each term, they don’t make up the bulk of the court’s docket. I wrote about this in greater detail after the court’s most recent term.

And yet as I noted then, this understanding of the court’s work flatly misunderstands the public’s interest in the court’s work. The average American does not care how the justices handle obscure civil-procedure questions, how they interpret ERISA, or the standards they use to review patent cases—all matters that the court tends to with enough regularity to deem them an essential part of its workload. But the justices also deliver rulings on areas of interest to a great many Americans, from social issues like abortion and LGBT rights to policy questions such as the scope of the federal government’s power and the constitutionality of major laws. And Americans can’t help but notice that rulings in those cases tend to fall along familiar lines.

[T]here are far more instances where it delivers rulings favored by the parties that nominated them. The justices would like you to believe this is a weird coincidence.

The actions of the Trump radical Republican Supreme Court have finally broken the public’s blind faith in the Supreme Court. A recent Quinnipiac Poll finds:

Americans give the Supreme Court a negative job approval rating, as 37 percent approve of the way it is handling its job and 49 percent disapprove, with 14 percent not offering an opinion.

Among registered voters, the Supreme Court receives a negative 37 – 50 percent job approval rating, with 13 percent not offering an opinion. This is the worst job approval since Quinnipiac University began asking the question in 2004, and a steep drop from July 2020, when registered voters approved 52 – 37 percent.

Roughly one-third (34 percent) of Americans think the Supreme Court is too conservative, roughly one- third (34 percent) think the Supreme Court is about right, 19 percent say they think the Supreme Court is too liberal, and 13 percent did not offer an opinion.

This will have an impact on the legitimacy of the Court’s decisions in the minds of the public. Yet another American institution undermined by the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Mitch McConnell.