The Man Gets a Big Lift from The Roberts Court

Justice may be blind, but it seems to know what business wants, and how to give it to them.

This has been obvious for a long time.  Recently, a Federal judge called out the Roberts Court in a Harvard Law Review article, writing,

“By now, it is a truism that Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a Supreme Court justice’s role is the passive one of a neutral baseball ‘umpire who [merely] calls the balls and strikes’ was a masterpiece of disingenuousness. …

“This is so because the Roberts Court has been anything but passive. Rather, the court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy. Indeed, the Roberts Court has contributed to ensuring that the political system in the United States pays little attention to ordinary Americans and responds only to the wishes of a relatively small number of powerful corporations and individuals.”

Full text here.  It’s a great, if angering, read.

No sooner had that hit the web, than a retired Hawaii State Judge, who not only is a former deputy attorney general of Hawaii, and adjust professor at the University of Hawaii law school, sent a scorching letter to the Supreme Court, resigning his position from The Supreme Court Bar.

“The Court, under your leadership and with your votes, has wantonly flouted established precedent. Your “conservative” majority has cynically undermined basic freedoms by hypocritically weaponizing others. The ideas of free speech and religious liberty have been transmogrified to allow officially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination, as well as to elevate the grossest forms of political bribery beyond the ability of the federal government or states to rationally regulate it. More than a score of decisions during your tenure have overturned established precedents—some more than forty years old– and you voted with the majority in most. There is nothing “conservative” about this trend. This is radical “legal activism” at its worst.”

Find the letter on Slate here.

Seems like they have company.  The book Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America by Adam Cohen was just published by Penguin Random House.  It purports to show how the highest court in the land has indeed been captured by the right wing to ensure the little guy, the disfavored religion, the person in most need of justice, won’t get it.  There’s a good interview on Fresh Air that’s worth a listen, or read, if you don’t have time for the book.

What I’ve never understood is that John Roberts was so patently and transparently disingenuous during his Senate confirmation hearings.  He was clearly for big business.  He was clearly a tool of The Federalist Society.  His ‘balls and strikes’ analogy was always wanting to the point of ridiculous.  But, for some reason, the Senate went along with it.