Insomnia gives one a chance to ponder (stress?) over everything you have read during the day, and sometimes you can think see interesting parallels. To tie together a couple of threads in recent posts, those around SCOTUS, and around congress addressing the debt limit. The Freedom Caucus, and really MTG along with her cohort, view politics as performance art. They have little interest in actually governing, it's about "winning the day", getting seen by media and scoring points against the Democrats. If you were actually interested in governing then the entire approach to the debt limit fight would be different. In many ways they reflect their electorate, which also seems less and less interested in governance. Proper posturing and extremist positions are much more likely to win a Republican primary than experience and a record actually governing. It's reflected in the rise of candidates vying for high office without ever having served in any lower position.
There are parallels with our current SCOTUS. I follow SCOTUSblog which on a daily basis links to interesting articles on the court. In the last week there have been several on the glacial pace at rendering decisions this term, the lowest number in over 100 years. The court has been trending downward in the number of cases it takes, this year only 59, less than a third of what it used to take a generation ago.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-slow-issue-rulings-glacially-slow-rcna81536
The current court looks uninterested in governing too. Previously, the court would take up a lot of cases on more minor points of law, providing guidance to lower courts and clarity to the legal community on how to interpret law. This was effectively good governance (putting aside how you viewed the outcomes of the decisions), making for a more efficient legal system with more clarity of potential outcomes. There were relatively few blockbuster cases, the general idea was to avoid them since they changed the status quo. Now we have a court that seems genuinely disinterested in those kinds of cases, culling the docket to a bare minimum. At 59 cases, each justice will average less than 7 opinions from the fall and winter terms. Of the 25% of opinions issued this term, almost all are unanimous or near unanimous on the mundane issues. Awaiting are a slew of block buster cases, first amendment right to discriminate, student loans, severely kneecapping the regulatory state and so on. The court doesn't see itself as rendering a workman like service to the legal community and nation, but instead rendering pronouncements from on high. It starts to make more sense why Alito is so snippy when challenged, he is important and you better act like it! This change in attitude is reflected in the ongoing ethics scandal. Previously most nominees to the court were near the end of prestigious legal careers, being on the court was a capstone to all their previous work. Now justices are deliberately picked to be young so they can serve extremely extended terms. They are picked not to run the legal system but to put their ideological stamp on every decision. With those in mind, it's not surprising they want money, prestige and fealty. They were told they are the masters of the legal universe, not caretakers of the legal universe, and so they are acting like it. I don't expect it to get any better because I can't see any opposing force that changes the current culture of this court.💯
I will add, as a point of information, that Steve Vladeck has also pointed out that the Court is issuing fewer opinions and giving the lower courts far less direction by using the shadow docket to dispense with too many cases.
The problems with the Roberts Court go well beyond his efforts to keep Congress away from the Court and Clarence Thomas.
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