Speaking at an event sponsored by a University of Louisville center named for the corrupt old ghoul who made up a rule to steal a SCOTUS seat from President Obama and then violated that same rule to steal the seat she occupies, Amy Coney Barrett expressed concern that the public sees the U.S. Supreme Court as a partisan institution. [ABC News]
Justices must be “hyper vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too,” Barrett said…
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.”
“To say the court’s reasoning is flawed is different from saying the court is acting in a partisan manner,” said Barrett…
Oh fuck all the way off, you illegitimately be-robed political hack.
Republicans fought hard and dirty to stand up a wingnut supermajority on the highest court in the land. Because too many people still indulge in the lofty fantasies Barrett was peddling in Louisville, the court will be a counter-majoritarian lever that enables a dwindling minority of hard-right god-botherers and gun-humpers to rule over the rest of us for the foreseeable future.
Sadly, not all of the people who buy this patently absurd Mount Olympus view of the court are Republican hypocrites. Justice Breyer wrote a spectacularly ill-timed book that WaPo’s Ruth Marcus described as “an earnest testament to the nonpartisanship and professionalism of his conservative colleagues” in a column this weekend. Marcus easily dismantles the assumptions behind that description and concludes:
I don’t want to sound too acerbic about Breyer here. I like and respect him. Even more, I feel for him. If you have devoted your life to an institution, and fear for its future, it is painful to watch, no less acknowledge, what is happening to it.
I’m sure that’s true. But to paraphrase Joe Biden in an entirely different context, if you won’t help, at least get out of the way.
Open thread.
Baud
I wonder if Kay has an opinion about all this.
MattF
Barrett is supposed to be smart, but I’m having doubts.
Edmund Dantes
Barrett said the media’s reporting of opinions doesn’t capture the deliberative process in reaching those decisions.
^^^^ stop shadow docketing some of your most important decisions and actually hearing the cases fully with briefings. Then actually write out full blown opinions so we can actually read about all the support for your decision, and there might be less of it.
problem is you got lazy and won’t even do the base level work that Roberts does to give some deniability to the Breyers and other elite law types of the world.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
Cheryl retweeted this from Elie Mystal and I think it’s about right:
https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1437401571185381378
lowtechcyclist
Yeah, it’s totally coincidental, how the outcomes of judicial philosophies match up so closely and so frequently with the political goals of the parties that nominated judges holding those philosophies.
the pollyanna from hell
As an anti-abortion fanatic she is used to being supported by a small army of terrorists. Her chutzpah is now enormously empowered by a large army of suicide meme-droolers.
dmsilev
@MattF: Now that she has her seat, there’s not much any of us can do about it, so from her perspective giving a speech that is essentially gloating about that fact is perfectly fine.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: lol
A Ghost to Most
They turned the Supreme Court into a christian supremacist tribunal. Now they want us to overlook it. Fuck that.
mrmoshpotato
Happy Monday! It’s always great when these fucking bastards just rub the horseshit right in our faces!
Between this and COVID still on its killing spree… Let’s see what Paul Bronks has been posting lately.
Central Planning
If Barrett was really concerned about the legitimacy of the court, she would resign.
She won’t retire. She doesn’t care about its legitimacy. Q.E.D.
quakerinabasement
Stay safe, Betty:
https://www.rawstory.com/paddleboarding-woman-alligator-viral-video/
Baud
@quakerinabasement: Maybe that is Betty.
Suzanne
Preach.
Grab a bottle of the BBQ sauce of your choice, pour it onto a huge plate, and eat my entire ass.
Shalimar
“People don’t see the deliberative process behind our 1-paragraph middle-of-the-night opinion that none of us had the courage to sign.”
germy
Meanwhile, there’s a faint hum in the background, the sound of the Jan. 6 Committee gathering info.
lowtechcyclist
@Edmund Dantes:
Yeah, the problem of fundamentally partisan judicial philosophies and outcomes was there even without the shadow docket. Just, as you say, given a patina of legitimacy by the written decisions.
And also agree that the use of the shadow docket for substantive, precedential decisions is an abuse of their powers. It’s really a big step into the majority effectively saying “we can decide whatever we damn well want to decide, we don’t have to show you how we arrived at those decisions, and if you don’t like it, screw you.”
Another Scott
Fight for 15!! Biden’s SCOTUS Reform commission’s 180 days are up soon.
It’s going to be a busy week on Capitol Hill, and a slog to October 1. RollCall:
Don’t expect an agreement until the last possible moment – that’s the way these things always work. But something will get done, and if past is prologue it will look much more like what Nancy and Chuck want than what S&M want. But everyone will be able to claim victory. “The $3.499T reconciliation bill is less than $3.5T and I can support it…”
Cheers,
Scott.
Ksmiami
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: expand the court or limit its jurisdiction. Ffs, the Supreme Court is 7 unelected tyrants in robes.
Baud
Remember all those books right-wing justices wrote to defend their liberal colleagues when they were being attacked by the right?
Yeah, me neither.
Baud
@Another Scott: You follow the sausage making so I don’t have to.
germy
Baud
@Another Scott: You follow the sausage making so I don’t have to.
germy
Cermet
The inferior court that she pretends is also just – in the sense that a fair fascist kangaroo court that rubber stamps thug theology dressed up in brow shirt storm trooper fashion would be nonpartisan. It does represent the jim crow party taliban-protestant beliefs that she and others on the court long for the rest of the country to follow.
neldob
I remember Kay writing that we should preface each Supreme by the name of who nominated them. So Trump Coney-Barrett, etc. Seems like a good idea to me.
bjacques
If Bony Carrot had any more gall, you could divide her into three parts.
Betty Cracker
@quakerinabasement: This is exactly why I don’t use paddleboards or kayaks; I require gunwales between myself and the gators.
WereBear
Puh-leese. That entire navy has sailed.
Matt McIrvin
When Barrett was confirmed, Donald Trump held a great big victory-lap party at the White House to celebrate that she was going to kill Roe v. Wade. The party ostentatiously ignored COVID masking/distancing protocols as a big old middle finger to Anthony Fauci and the liberals, and it became a COVID superspreader event.
We’re supposed to regard this majority as humble callers of balls and strikes.
Another Scott
What I find infuriating about this is that there are lots of things that the SCOTUS does that are unanimous or nearly so and they actually do work together and have sensible rulings. In that sense, she is right – they are non-political and do their jobs. But that’s like saying that everyone, including axe murderers, likes ice cream…
When it comes to GQP orthodoxy (money = speech; everyone gets a gun everywhere; corruption is fine unless there are demands for suitcases full of money; the POTUS can do what he wants unless he’s a Democrat; there is no right to vote and have the vote be counted fairly; minorities, women and non-CIS people have to lump it; ‘christianity’ uber alles, etc., etc.) they bend over backwards to find the most RWNJ path in an opinion and expect the rest of it to accept it, because everyone likes ice cream.
It’s clumsy, transparent, slight of hand and disingenuous bad-faith claptrap.
Fight for 15!!
Cheers,
Scott.
MattF
@Cermet: It’s fair to say that ‘fascist’ and ‘partisan’ aren’t comparable.
Kay
@Baud:
LOL
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: Exactly. In a sense, that ostentatiously partisan victory party was more tolerable than this hypocritical “nonpartisan” bullshit. Now Barrett is attempting to piss on our heads and tell us it’s raining.
Not gonna work, lady — you owe your lifetime seat to the machinations of your openly corrupt party leaders, so you have to marinate in that filthy illegitimacy. You don’t get to make the rest of us pretend we didn’t see it.
Kay
Maybe someone could tell him it isn’t about him?
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Roberts’ whole balls-and-strikes notion is bullshit in ways that have nothing to do with partisanship. The district courts are quite capable of making the balls-and-strikes calls correctly, with backup from the circuit courts if they call one wrong.
The cases that make it to the Supreme Court are more analogous to asking, “what the hell should the strike zone even look like in this area of law?”
Betty
@Edmund Dantes: Not just lazy, sneaky. Despite her protest, they don’t want the public to know what they are up to.
Barbara
The fact that a sitting justice feels the need to deny this is simply additional proof that it is true. Otherwise you let your opinions do the talking. I mean, she is appearing in public with a SITTING SENATOR who for naked political reasons blocked a duly elected president from filling a vacant seat. Fucking ACB you might wish we were blind, deaf and dumb but we aren’t.
germy
(Six Capitol police officers are being disciplined.)
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Yeah, I think we’re going to face an onslaught of “let bygones by bygones” propaganda, which we always face whenever the Republicans score an illegitimate victory over us.
Kay
They’re leaving “the institution” in worse shape than they found it, which IMO takes them out of the “institutionalist” category, unless they’re institutionalists who suck at protecting the institution and failed, in which case we don’t need their scolding lectures.
Kay
@Barbara:
Let’s go back to that. It worked better.
Barbara
@Kay:
Yep. Not about you. It’s really hard to give up power, but that doesn’t mean we have to respect you for it.
rikyrah
Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) tweeted at 4:16 AM on Sun, Sep 12, 2021:
NEW: The story of Scalia clerk who quietly became legal mastermind behind Texas abortion law. Our reporting found he explicitly wrote the law so it could survive regardless of what court did. His efforts to flummox court date to ‘13 when he 1st tried this. https://t.co/TkGJazpRja
(https://twitter.com/nytmike/status/1436982062393798660?s=03)
lowtechcyclist
OT: if the Christianists are in the least bit troubled by Trump’s speech to the Moonies, I sure haven’t heard about it.
Cult, schmult – all that seems to matter to them anymore is whether they have the correct politics. And the Moonies are easily far right enough to please the fundagelicals.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
“Justice Barrett” is an oxymoron. As is “Justice Kavanaugh”. As well as “Justice Thomas”, “Justice Alito”, and “Justice Gorsuch”.
Her name, now and forevermore, as far as I’m concerned, is “Amy Covid Barrett”, with no honorific before her name.
Kay
No one should criticize her. If we do we’ll be subjected to 500 whining articles about how she’s a victim.
The courts speaks thru orders. Ignore the rest of their editorializing and campaigning. It doesn’t matter.
rikyrah
Your post was righteous and on point
rikyrah
@Kay:
Absolutely ??
rikyrah
@Kay:
Too much truth, Kay??
Betty
@Kay: That seems to be beyond our ability. He is so wrapped w in himself, he seems to think he can control his life span.
laura
That bish can keep scrubbing her hands, but the blood will not ever come off, and she can look forward to an entire lifetime of having her role and her decisions called out for the illegitimate bullshit they are until she’s dead and buried. And if she doesn’t like it, she can step on down. Speechifying while draped in the not quite dead corpse of Mitch McConnell is one hell of a look for a gal trying to convince our media betters that she’s not at all the partisan extremist hack that errrybody can plainly see that she is.
rikyrah
@A Ghost to Most:
Absolutely phuck that trifling trick ?
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah: Looks like the Texas Monthly reported this first, and of course the FTFNYT gives them no credit:
https://twitter.com/ggreeneva/status/1437060609359687685
Kay
@laura:
So unfair of you to judge her on her work. How dare you.
Kay
I wish one of the students would stand up and say “but this is all bullshit, correct? I mean, you issued some orders. Can’t we just read those?”
Kay
Here’s their work. Judge it.
They shouldn’t ask for more than that and you certainly shouldn’t give it to them.
laura
@Kay: How dare you
I heard that in the Greta Thunberg voice ?
Steeplejack
Betty Cracker
@Kay: This was a bit discouraging:
I’m sorry to hear that this hack, her fellow possessor of stolen property Gorsuch, and the inadequately investigated screaming rage-baby Kavanaugh can publicly visit any city without attracting a large crowd of protestors.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: There’s a long history of the Moonies being friends of American conservative politicians and political figures. They’ve never been particularly embarrassed.
WaterGirl
I haven’t read any of the comments yet, but I have to declare my undying love for this sentence and for love and respect for Betty Cracker for writing it.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Conservatives like taking Moonie cash. I think they pay good money for a speech.
laura
@Kay: Well, I read the order and am back to judge it…..and it is not good work. Alito relies on a Lochner era sovereign immunity case (Jones) to legitimize the vigilantism baked into SB8 and then uses an brand new “complex procedural antecedents” burden that the plaintiff’s couldn’t address because they are ginned up bullshit that by design overrule Roe as the fatal flaw in the requests for relief and then attempts to reassure the reader that he hasn’t just rendered the constitutionality of Roe null and void when in fact, it’s as plain as day that’s exactly what he’s done along with the rest of the partisan hacks on the court.
Hot partisan garbage that can be seen from space and no secret that the longing to return to Lochner is the very essence of the trump court.
Kay
It’s a kind of stupidity. She can’t even imagine that actual women were affected by this decision that day and every day since. The affected women aren’t part of the discussion and I have seen ONE news article that even bothered to ask them.
The word count comparison between the elite lawyers ruling and commenting and the actual women affected would be so lopsided as to be ludicrous. They aren’t heard from.
Imagine if this had been a gun ruling, where they upheld a law banning guns. We would be FLOODED with gun nut protestations.
It’s because it’s women who are affected and primarily low income low status women. That’s why they’re never heard from. They won’t even be asked. Who cares?
senyordave
Headline:
Partisan hack SC justice emphatically denies that the SC has partisan hacks.
SFAW
@bjacques:
Very nicely done
ETA: Had I been more on my game, I would have asked if those were the weenie, weedy, and weaky parts.
azlib
I think she doth protest to much. She should have declined the nomination if she did not want to be seen as a hack.
Omnes Omnibus
@azlib: No, she should not have been a hack I’d she didn’t want to be seen as a hack. She got a lifetime appointment; she doesn’t need to be a hack. For comparison, Harry Blackmun was seen as Burger’s mini-me when he was appointed, but he chose to be something more. Being a hack is a choice.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Also, using the shadow docket for something this big is a hack move. Roe is a big deal; if you are going to end it, have the courage to step up and do it. Don’t skulk around in the darkness and the suffocate it in its sleep and then complain that people think you are the kind of person who skulks around in the darkness and suffocates things in their sleep.
Ksmiami
@Barbara: ding ding ding… Perhaps if we keep fighting and making sure the Slimy 7 don’t get into the latest DC hot restaurant etc thru shunning and pressure, they will relent a bit- until then, they are my enemy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ksmiami: Seven?
gene108
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Her name is Mrs. Jesse Barrett.
Before feminazis took over everything, in the 1970’s, this is how traditional Christian women, who respected traditional Christian marriage were addressed.
JaneE
The fact that she could make this statement in public without apparent shame just proves to me that she is truly a partisan hack. She might as well put up a billboard saying “We are bought and paid for by the Republican party”.
Librarian
@Kay: What she means is that she will overturn decisions, like Obamacare and Obergefell, and impose her ideology, no matter what chaos it causes in the country, and she will not give a shit. She is a sociopath.
oatler
Boof!
Too soon?
RaflW
Am I wrong in thinking CJ John Roberts has remained extremely quiet and is keep his head down through all this? I don’t give a fig about his feels, but he has managed, with McConnell + Trump’s help, to be presiding over a disastrously partisan court.
The damage is well under way already. Will it matter? I honestly do not know. I think the country will unravel quite a bit further, wether the Scotus maintains the fiction of neutrality or not. But what is happening there now is shifting from problem to accelerant, and that really really bothers me.
So, really, even as he can’t shift who is in the other eight seats: Fuck CJ Roberts. He’s got the petard he thought he always wanted.
Ksmiami
@Omnes Omnibus: not happy with Breyer rn sorry
pajaro
If this is the way she feels, presumably she would feel the same about a court that was four persons larger, with serious judges appointed by President Biden in the 2022 Court Enlargement Act. /s/ There would be no reason for her to assume a larger court could not issue unbiased decisions, right?
Somewhat more seriously, one of the things that people here (for very good reasons, BTW) don’t always appreciate is that for many, even most, of the Court’s cases– resolving commercial disputes, dealing with arcane issues of criminal or civil procedure, for example–they do actually function like a real court. So I can understand (although not appreciate) how someone like Breyer can convince himself that the Justices aren’t a bunch of political thugs. But, on the cases that actually make a difference to most of our lives, they are the nakedly political actors that we all know them to be.
Bumper
So, I’m going to share a bit of personal info, which I’m normally very reluctant to do. Twenty years ago I was a law student at a top tier law school, where many of the professors had many connections with the Supreme Court. At the time, the belief that there were partisan influences at work in decisions was not uncommon – lots of people outside of the court could see it and I remember discussions around the school. But people – law professors, no less – who had connections with the court, including as clerks, seemed unable to see this. My con law II professor was one such and he was as liberal as they come (I forget who he clerked for). When this topic came up in class one day, he absolutely insisted the same thing that Barrett is saying today EVEN regarding Scalia and Thomas decisions. The students were in disbelief and challenged him but he couldn’t see it. There must be something going on there that they wrap themselves up in these ideas and seem so out of touch with what outsiders see.
Tony Gerace
@MattF: Barrett is smart enough at what matters: Obtaining and maintaining power. Nothing else matters to people like her.
Anomalous Cowherd
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
I call her “ Amy Covid Barratry” since she essentially wrote an opinion piece to assert her conservative creds and campaign for her appointment. Blecch.