This composite of the supremes says it all though Alito and Thomas are not included in this pix depicting justices not worthy of being called supremes in this writer's opinion. It seems Linda Greenhouse, a superb documentarian on the court, agrees.
When I left the daily Supreme Court beat back in 2008, the Week in Review, as The Times’s Sunday Review section was then called, invited me to offer some reflections on nearly 30 years of writing about the court, its cases and its members. The long essay ran under the headline “2,691 Decisions,” a number based on an editor’s calculation of how many decisions the court had issued during my time on the beat. I ended it with an observation about the “vital dialogue” between the court and the country. This was my conclusion:
“The court is in Americans’ collective hands. We shape it; it reflects us. At any given time, we may not have the Supreme Court we want. We may not have the court we need. But we have, most likely, the Supreme Court we deserve.”
A friend who recently came upon that article challenged me. “Do you still think we have the Supreme Court we deserve?” she asked.
Actually, sadly, my answer now is no.
Thank W and Trump for the SC we don't deserve.
One might suppose that the supercharged conservative majority might proceed with some caution, if not humility, before projecting its agenda on a wary country that never signed up for it. After all, of the six Republican-appointed justices, only three were named by a president who won a majority of the popular vote — Justice Clarence Thomas by George H.W. Bush, and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Alito by George W. Bush in his second term. And given the small-state, red-state tilt of the Senate, it’s not surprising that the senators whose votes provided the narrow margins for confirming the three Trump-chosen justices represent less than half the country’s population.
Yet what we see from the court is not humility but, to put it politely, a lack of situational awareness. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, something the court has given every indication that it will do within the next six months. Three-quarters of respondents in one recent poll said the abortion decision should be left to women and their doctors. (That was also the view of a majority of the public in a Gallup poll released in the summer of 1972, shortly before the court issued its decision in Roe.)
When reading Greenhouse's excellent analysis, callousness and incompetency come to mind regarding W and Trump as both exhibited these traits in spades with W's excellent adventure Weapons of Mass Destruction fiasco and Trump's mishandling of Covid along with his Jan 6th coup attempt to remain president of the good ole USA. We are in desperate trouble and the succession of mediocrities in the White House, after Eisenhower and Kennedy, have led us to an existential crisis as to whether this country will continue to remain a viable nation as we move further into the 21st century.
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