Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Today In Democratic Decline

 The Dobbs decision has focused attention on the tremendous unaccountability of our Courts. What's more, we have incidents like Neil Gorsuch selling a property to a prominent law firm shortly after being elevated to the Supreme Court. We have the entirety of Clarence Thomas' ethics scandals. We have Matthew Kacsmaryk essentially falsifying his record on writing a law review during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Nothing quite as obvious as a quid pro quo, but there certainly seems to be a lot of overlap with shady-assed actions and the more conservative members of America's courts.

What's really frustrating is that there isn't anything we can do about it.

The 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court was created by a political party that has won the popular vote once since 1988. The courts cannot be plausibly said to represent anything like the will of the American people, whether it's on abortion and reproductive rights, gun control or anti-regulatory zeal. 

And there's nothing we can do about it, because the assumption has always been that judges sit above the law in some sort of monastic neutrality. That was never true, but it's been especially galling now that we have courts that are perfectly willing to rewrite 75 years of jurisprudence because they know that there is no way to hold them accountable. 

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