From voting rights, to reproductive rights, to gun control, to Presidential immunity and more, the illegitimate Republican Supreme Court is on the ballot in November, especially when it comes to the one- third of the Senate up for election. It should go without saying that having a Democrat in the White House and Democrats maintaining control of the Senate is absolutely vital to what is likely to be a long process of returning our democracy to majority rule and the rule of law.
In his Vox article, "The Supreme Incompetents," Ian Millhiser looks at the Court's mounting evidence of incompetent, nihilistic jurisprudence in a number of recent cases (here's another place the intrepid media on the cognitive beat could be focusing). Turns out, despite their high- falutin' legal pedigrees, the six Republicans- in- robes are just Trump with a law degree:
... I used to believe that Trump and his followers and the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that played an enormous role in choosing his judges, were two distinct authoritarian movements that shared power during Trump’s four years in office. The MAGA movement is a cult of personality that seeks to elevate a singularly chaotic man. The Federalist Society and its allies prefer a distinctly lawful tyranny that still follows predictable rules.
But then the Federalist Society’s picks took over the Supreme Court. And they have behaved so haphazardly, with such eagerness to smash institutions built over decades or even centuries, that it’s hard to see them as anything other than Donald Trump with a law degree. Unlike Trump, the Court’s Republican majority speaks in polished legal prose when they decide to hurl decades worth of settled expectations into the sun. But their behavior on the bench is no less chaotic than that of the insurrectionist president who appointed half of them.
Worse, the United States has what might be called a Dunning-Kruger Supreme Court — after the psychological phenomenon where incompetent people fail to recognize their own incompetence.
Millhiser goes through several cases to prove his point, discussing not only the errant reasoning and brash overturning of long- established precedent, but the six Republicans- in- robes' refusal to fix the problems they create with their awful decisions. Like,
This term, the Supreme Court was handed a golden opportunity to fix the abortion crisis that it created. Moyle v. United States asked the justices to enforce a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires nearly all hospitals to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.”
That includes patients who require an abortion to stabilize their condition because EMTALA contains no exception for abortions.
But the Supreme Court didn’t simply refuse to read EMTALA according to its plain text. It refused to decide the Moyle case altogether, kicking it back down to a lower court for what could be months of more litigation...Had the Court ruled that EMTALA means what it says, that would have done a tremendous amount to clarify when abortions are lawful, even in very red states.
