...it is time to attack the Supreme Court directly. No, not the building, or the justices. Not physically, but through the Congress, which has authority over the court through Article III; and through Constitutional Amendments, if need be. Congress can start by requiring the Justices be subject to the same ethical oversight by an independent body as the rest of the Article III judges are; and subject to the same rules on retirement as those judges. And then consider something to make them leave D.C. and serve in the courtroom to see the impact of their rulings, and remember that law serves the people, and the people are not servants of the law. Justice Barrett hides from responsibility by claiming she must be above the concerns of ordinary people. The school of jurisprudence known as judicial realism counsels balancing the impartiality of the law with the needs of the parties before the court. Perhaps she needs to have her nose rubbed in that reality. It’s an abdication of judicial responsibility to insist your only responsibility is to the Law. And what is the Law? What you say it is.NEW: @CAGovernor Gavin Newsom on today’s Supreme Court ruling:
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) September 8, 2025
“Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who…
Nice work, if you can get it.
Certainly all the Justices need to leave their self-created bubble. Justice Kavanaugh speaks for a court too arrogant to explain itself to the people, but he just reinforces the court’s opinion of itself as a disinterested force ruling dispassionately over people not capable or deserving of understanding their burdens as Justices, and are better treated as errant children who deserve only the answer: “Because I said so.”
That Court has lost its legitimacy. It is time we, the people, began the hard work of restoring it. That is the attack on the court I mean; and no other.
This court has retreated so far up the ivory tower they have completely lost sight of the ground and are suffering brain damage from the lack of oxygen. Kavanaugh is speaking of a world that only exists in his mind, it has no basis in reality as pointedly revealed by the dissent. It hasn't gotten as much press as her other quotes from her book, but Barrett made the bizarre comment that the Supreme Court doesn't do justice. As a lawyer, I recognize that the courts apply the law, but there is an intention to do justice even if imperfectly and cruelly. What is equity if not a form of justice for example. For Barrett, they are applying "The Law". I'd like to ask, where does this "law" come from? What is the intention? Much of what the court does is well beyond the mere words of a statute. So what is the purpose of all this "law"? Kavanaugh, Barrett and the other four arch-reactionaries wouldn't last two weeks in a Christian ethics class in seminary, the professor would metaphorically dismember them and feed them into the paper shredder for such muddled and unhinged thinking. They want power, but they don't want the responsibility that comes with that power. The reality is that this "law" they are so enamored with serves to further consolidate power, money and influence in a select community that is primarily white, wealthy and Christian. I find Barrett's assertion of rejecting justice as particularly strange in view of her overt claims of faith. How does she reconcile her position with the command to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God? The six reject justice, and routinely reject mercy for the criminal defendant, Thomas going so far as to reject actual innocence in death penalty cases. There is no humility in their exercise of power, they won't even deign to issue opinions now. Barrett has completely inverted Christian practice, money matters, ideas (The Law!) matters, people aren’t even part of the equation with the exclusion of justice.
ReplyDeleteI guess I am sensitive given recent experiences. My pastor has said that if you are not nervous entering the pulpit to preach, you are in the wrong profession. You should tremble to speak of God. I didn't completely understand this until I sat down to write my sermon. Then I viscerally felt that responsibility, it takes to preach to a congregation. Now all those words carry weight and meaning, there is a tremendous responsibility. It may have been a smaller crowd composed of the truly committed that will show up in the middle of August, but who are they and how will they understand your words? I was deeply grateful for my pastor reading of my draft sermon and her kind guidance on thinking through what I meant to say. Our SCOTUS stands before a nation of 340M+, and the words they use and decisions they render can literally result in life or death. Yet they currently approach their power not with humility at their task and a sense of responsibility to the individuals impacted by their decisions (they don’t even seem to care at this point about the actual litigants in the current cases). We have them yielding massive power without even explanation. A grand counsel, not a deliberative body.
I feel that I am coming to this too often, but I will say it again. Yesterday’s decision was yet another blow against the least. The best sermon I ever heard about the vineyard workers pointed out that the workers were day laborers. Every day they hoped for work so they and their families could eat. If there was no work, they had nothing for that day. In that light, when the laborer that arrives in the last hour and is paid the same as the one who worked all day are both paid a day’s wages, the focus is not on the work or our sense of fairness. The focus is that all the laborers and their families will get to eat and live another day. That is what justice looks like. (As I write, I now also am thinking about whose sense of fairness. We as outsiders think that getting paid the same for one or eight hours work is unfair. But if you were one of the laborers, would you feel the same? You would know what it is like to not get selected for work, you would know what it means to go home with nothing. To be picked first is to not spend the day in anxiety and worry about earning nothing. Yes, the other worker worked less, but tomorrow that could be use experiencing the mercy of day’s wage instead of deprivation.) But Kavanaugh, pens a concurrence allowing the full power of the state to oppress the least, those seeking wages on a day by day basis. These are the people at the absolute bottom of the labor pool, the poorest of the poor. The “low-wage” worker is a class worthy of oppression no matter their immigration status. Even the US citizen in this low-wage class is deemed unworthy of the protections offered to the white, the native English speaker, and the financially privileged. We would never subject the latter group to racial profiling, demands of proof of citizenship, detention, and violent abduction from the streets. Kavanaugh and Barrettt are firsts in service to the firsts. The lasts stay last under their “law”.
ReplyDeleteLet justice flow down like waters.