OPINION: I hate my car. Sure, it looks nice, it drives well and it’s never broken down on me. The issue is it cannot jump, and that’s what I need it to do now, as a tree is in the way of the road. Some guy keeps cutting them and pushing them into the road, and it would be a lot easier if my car could just jump over them. Anyways, people are often nonsensical in their displeasure with the Supreme Court.
I often find that the criticism encountered on the Supreme Court comes about in two major categories that I will address. The first is as follows: critics of a given case believe that they know the law better than the justices themselves. Bemoaning decisions, the critic belittles the general opinion of the Court when it is 5-4 or 6-3. Of course, they often rely upon the media summarization of the two sides of the case and rarely interact with the opinions themselves. Putting aside that, by far, the worst reporting in the world is any report on the Supreme Court, the Court always provides the main opinion and often concurring opinions and dissenting opinions, all of which are written in relatively plain language because the Court wants people to read them. How can one truly claim to know better on the law without directly engaging with the arguments made by the Court themselves? Now, some may decry that they lack the time to read the long documents, and that may be true, but I myself lack the time to read all the new research on rocket science and, as such, rarely speak with any authority on the matter. While it is possible some individual may possess a valid case for the claim that they are a greater and more accurate legal mind than some of the justices, it is not true for anyone unwilling to read those documents.
Second, many objections confuse legal judgment with moral judgment. The Supreme Court is not tasked with determining what is morally desirable; it is tasked with interpreting the Constitution and federal law. If the Constitution were to contain a provision mandating all babies are prohibited from wearing hats, the Court’s role would still be to enforce that provision as written, no matter how well my newborn child pulls off a fedora. Those who take umbrage, as I would, with such a law should not look towards the Court, but should rather take umbrage with Congress. This distinction is central to understanding cases like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Court did not declare abortion unconstitutional; rather, it held that the Constitution does not explicitly protect a right to abortion, thereby returning regulatory authority to the states. Whether that outcome is desirable is a political question, not a legal one. If a national right is to be established, the responsibility lies with Congress or the constitutional amendment process.
Why didn’t, in 2009, when Democrats held majorities in all three needed bodies, Congress pass a law enshrining the right to abortion? Why did they leave such an important right up to shaky and contestable legal theory? Because it is Congress, not the Supreme Court, that is broken.
Genuine issues with the Court exist. Clarence Thomas used to be one of the most consistent and predictable theorists on the bench, but within the last few years he has, in my opinion, begun using loose loopholes to attempt to align his originalist doctrine with the perceived Republican-aligned angle on a decision. But whose fault is it that we’ve yet to enforce an ethics committee for the Court? Whose fault is it that there are no age limits? It’s Congress’s and Congress’s alone.
The current need to see the “desirable” outcome from the Court rather than the legally correct one is a path towards destruction. Not every decision is correct and good; to lose faith in the courts because of it is to further wear away at a body which relies only on trust because it itself lacks any executive ability. To push it to all but pass laws is to transfer that power from an elected body which faces the people regularly to a highly protected elite vanguard who do not need to care about the people’s opinion.
So I ask those haters of the Court, when they struck down the tariffs in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump, did you agree with the Court because you hated tariffs or because you, like the justices, realized this is a case of the major questions doctrine which runs almost parallel to Biden v. Nebraska, the case on student loan forgiveness. Did you see see that in Gorsuch’s concurrent opinion he reprimands six of the nine justices for hypocrisy because to agree or disagree with one necessitates agreeing or disagreeing with both? Or did you dislike one because it shot down a desirable policy while liking one because it shot down an undesirable policy? Perhaps we should stop asking our car to jump, and instead stop the a*shole who’s been putting trees in the middle of the road for the last 50 years.
