No. of Recommendations: 15
Who the hell are you kidding?
John Roberts
Any guesses why the public might view the Supreme Court as political?
Chief Justice John Roberts gave remarks this week in which he pushed back on the public perception that justices might be motivated by politics. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty,” he said. “We’re not simply part of the political process, and there’s a reason for that, and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.” You all heard the man. We suspect that many of you may owe him an apology.
But really. It takes an awful lot of … we don’t know what … to say the public is wrong to believe that there might be political interests on this court one week after six judges went out of their way to re-nuke surviving elements of the Voting Rights Act. Four years after nuking the right to an abortion. Three years after affirmative action. Two years after providing Trump broad presidential immunity. A year after curbing the Chevron doctrine. It was a passionate, decadeslong central organizing effort of the Republican Party for 50 years to install a court like this, so that it would make decisions that suited the Republican coalition’s interests. Now it is doing so. Roberts is right that this SCOTUS majority is not “part of the political process.” It’s a product of it. These decisions didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. Slate
