Context For The Context That Needs Context

Count on @Dahlialithwick to strike exactly the right note about what mask-gate is — and isn’t — about:https://t.co/yelMa2mwCx

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) January 20, 2022

Dahlia Lithwick has some good observations on this, including how utterly absurd it is. But it ends up with what the knowing, and the scorpions in the bottle, call “both-siderism.”

I guess this is how maskgate ends. With yet more polarized public outrage. Again. Me, I see it as yet another opportunity for an institution to have modeled real collegiality and genuine mutual respect, but yet again it is instead snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Imagine if everyone had simply put on a mask for a few weeks, not because the science was perfect, but out of respect for a colleague they loudly claim to adore. Imagine if we weren’t fighting about who had to “ask” their colleague to do what would plainly be the respectful thing. But Gorsuch—who writes so dismissively of the risks around COVID—didn’t want to “play politics” by conceding that COVID is actually quite dangerous, especially to the elderly and those with underlying conditions. This isn’t a theoretical problem. It sits next to him at work. So, if Mike Davis is telling the truth, instead of respecting that possibility, he played politics by performing his contempt for the public health guidelines in place throughout the District of Columbia and his own place of business. Checkmate. Everyone can be a little more self-certain and pissed off.

My conclusion still stands, and it doesn’t contradict Ms. Lithwick’s: Sotomayor doesn’t want to die on this hill; Gorsuch is a dick. The public record supports both conclusions, and Justice Sotomayor wants to expend her indignation where it counts:

‘I will not stand by silently’: Sotomayor blasts SCOTUS conservatives over their latest attack on abortion rightshttps://t.co/wA0J3e8Ruz

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 20, 2022

Should that impassioned dissent be overshadowed by “maskgate”? Clearly not. Ms.Lithwick had the right approach in the beginning:

I just wanted the court to tell us what their public health rules were, and when, and if the justices declined to abide by their own rules, to explain why.

That has been lost, but the Court is not a victim of society here. It has its own agency in this process. It cannot wade into and out of the polarizing issues of the day (rolling back constitutional rights is hardly on par with Brown overruling “separate but equal”) with supreme disengagement. If the Court is losing its authority of equanimity and cool, dispassionate deliberation, the Court has only itself to blame.