gracchusdixit

As the credibility of Supreme Court of the United States crumbles before very our eyes, the conservative ideologues who control it appear to be either blind or indifferent to its vertiginous fall. There are two reasons for the court’s woes, neither of which those ideologues care, or dare, to acknowledge.

The first reason is the blatant corruption of several members of the court’s conservative majority. Even as that right-wing junta has abandoned every semblance of the judicial and institutional probity the court has long pretended to embody, its most vocal members insist that they are abiding by the highest ethical standards. Those protestations have become increasingly preposterous, as, with dizzying speed, we have learned that several of the court’s most staunchly conservative members have engaged in behavior that is not only unethical but may also be illegal.

The most outrageous offender (thus far at least) is Clarence Thomas. Which should surprise no one. Thomas has always been an ethical train wreck and should never have been appointed to the court in the first place—though few are prepared to say so because he is the beneficiary of the “affirmative” racial discrimination he pretends to deplore. His confirmation hearings thirty years ago were a disgrace, in which he pretended to be the victim of what he dubbed a “high-tech lynching,” egged on by complicit senators on both sides of the political aisle. The performative tantrum Thomas ginned up for the cameras back then achieved the desired result. His sexual abuse of Anita Hill was swept under the rug, and his intellectual failings were ignored.

Thirty years on, it is no longer possible to pretend that Clarence Thomas is anything but the self-serving grifter he has always been. For decades, he and his lobbyist wife have, like hogs at the proverbial trough, been gulping down bounties from rich Republican donors. One such donor, a dodgy Texas billionaire named Harlen Crow, went so far as to purchase the home of the Thomas’ mother, doing it up in fine style, and allowing her to live there rent-free, all the while tucking a tidy bit of cash into the judge’s pocket. This cornucopia, we have been endlessly told, is an innocent expression of personal friendship, having nothing whatever to do with the powerful perch Thomas occupies on the court.

Even if such a preposterous proposition were true, the tasteless extravagance of such a “friendship” should, long ago, have caused anyone with an ounce of shame to crawl under the nearest rock. However, right-wing hucksters like Clarence and Ginni Thomas have no shame, and the Harlen Crows of the world, safely cordoned off from the rest of humanity behind the walls of their exclusive gated communities, simply do not care what the sans-culottes may think.

Thomas is not the only grifter on the court. Its other certifiably crazy right-wing-nut, Samuel Alito, has been treating himself to goodies provided by the rich and powerful for years. When it was suggested that his insouciant greed might somehow be inappropriate, Alito took to the ever-compliant editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to huff and puff, whine and snivel that he was being unfairly attacked. Alito, like Thomas, is a revanchist Catholic, animated by a perpetual and fictional sense of persecution and martyrdom. Thus, he justifies his victimization of others by claiming that he is the victim.

Then, there is the prissily sanctimonious Neil Gorsuch, who, more than any other member of the court, has curated a public persona of nose-in-the-air judicial rectitude. Sadly for the noble jurist, this precious pose crumpled like papier-mâché with the news that the head of a major law firm with regular business before the court paid Mr. Nose-in-Air several hundred thousand dollars for a piece of low-rent real estate the high-minded judge had been trying to dump for years.

Finally, there is the Chief Justice himself, or rather, the Chief Spouse, Jane Roberts, who has been paid millions of dollars as a head-hunter for the country’s biggest law firms. Although Mme. Roberts is a lawyer with an adequate pedigree, she is by no one’s account a legal supernova. To believe that she would have been paid such sums had she not been married to the principal legal officer in the land, strains every synapse in even the most credulous brain. As the John-and-Jane duo surely know, conflicts of interest do not require an explicit quid pro quo; it is enough that they invite suspicion. If that duo is now enveloped in a cloud of suspicion, they have only themselves to blame.

To give them their due, the right-wing crazies on today’s court did not start all this. They are merely following in the hallowed footsteps of that ideological hero of judicial conservatives, the late Antonin Scalia. It was Scalia who championed the bogus concept of “originalism” that has poisoned constitutional decision-making for two decades. And it was Scalia who drew his last breath in a lavish room at a luxury “ranch” owned by yet another dubious Texas billionaire, having spent several days slaughtering innocent animals. Whether Scalia ever paid for the room or the evil privilege of butchering the creatures made by the god he pretended to worship, we will probably never know.

What we do know is that Scalia’s tawdry end has taught his right-wing legatees on the court exactly nothing. Given the tsunami of ethical embarrassments they now face, one might imagine that the Chief Justice would seize upon any opportunity to clear his own name, the reputation of the person he is married to, and the crumbling reputation of the institution entrusted to his care.

But no.

When John Roberts was invited—not subpoenaed, mind you, but simply “invited”—to testify before the Senate committee that is constitutionally empowered to oversee the court, he “respectfully declined” on the grounds that accepting the invitation would compromise the court’s “judicial independence,” the “separation of powers,” and the principle of “checks and balances”. This rebuff was a breathtaking example of hypocrisy.

More importantly, it exposed the true scandal of the court, which is the intellectual incompetence of its conservative majority and of the Chief Justice himself.

Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States will you find the phrases, “judicial independence,” “separation of powers,” or “checks and balances”. Although these concepts have been discussed by political thinkers from Montesquieu to Mill and should not be disregarded lightly, they are not now, nor have they ever have been, the law of the land.

What is more, no credible interpretation of “judicial independence” has ever implied legal immunity; the “separation of powers” has never been construed to insulate one branch of government from being challenged by another; and the very idea of “checks and balances” does not forbid—on the contrary, it demands—that each branch of government must answer to and be held accountable by the rest.
None of these principles gives the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court the right to snub the Article I branch of government, the powers of which get far more attention in the constitution than the paltry and limited powers of the Article III branch over which he presides. That John Roberts chose to ignore, or is ignorant of, these facts, tells you all you need to know about the dishonesty and intellectual vacuity of the man himself and the conservative members of the court over which he presides.

Just weeks ago, the court handed down two decisions that are painful to read, because they are so deliberately cruel, because they are so illogical and contradictory, and because they reveal for the whole world to see the intellectual incapacity of the Supreme Court of the United States.
One of those decisions disallows “affirmative action” programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, on the absurd grounds that the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which was enacted to reverse the inestimable horrors of slavery, prohibits any preferment or discrimination on the basis of race. The other decision, issued a few days later, gives an evangelical Christian “web designer” the right to deny her services to gay Americans because of her “sincerely” held belief that homosexuality is a “violation of biblical law”. This, despite the fact that no gay customers have even asked for those services.

Thus, in the perverse view of the Roberts court, secular discrimination designed to foster a more inclusive and tolerant society is ipso facto wrong, whereas religiously grounded discrimination designed to exclude and condemn sexual minorities is condoned and protected on the grounds of “religious freedom”. It does not take much imagination to anticipate where this twisted thinking goes next.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when “sincere” religious belief was used to justify slavery, to assert the racial inferiority of “negroes,” to prohibit inter-racial marriage, to criminalize gays and lesbians, and to rationalize the extermination of millions of Jews, Muslims, and Christian “heretics”. And yet, if you read the decisions of the conservative majority that now controls the Supreme Court of the United States, you would never know that such a time ever existed or that such atrocities ever occurred.

There was another time, a better time, when truly great-minded jurists—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Thurgood Marshall—sat on the dais that looms over the majestic chamber of the Supreme Court of the United States. For all their failings, and they were many, they were public servants, and public intellectuals, of the first order. They understood that part of their obligation as public servants was to think, and think deeply, about the issues confronting democratic societies. They took to heart the ancient admonition, lex injusta non est lex, “an unjust law is no law at all”. In their judicial decision-making, they asked: Will this decision advance justice? And before they reached their decisions, they strove to answer the question: What is just?

Compared with such giants, the conservatives who control today’s court are intellectual pygmies. Worse yet, they are moral monsters, who will, if they are not stopped, send us back to the dark ages.