I find the Supreme court decisions to be fascinating reads and overall much more interesting and complicated than most news services make them out to be.
If you're willing to entertain these are skilled brilliant jurists with some kind of mystical levels of elucidation, maybe they're actually just people who failed upward into a job with a fancy robe
It doesn't take a good developer to describe a system in a way that nobody can understand it. It does take a great one to describe a system in a way that a layman can understand it.
There's a group of attorneys that host a podcast on SCOTUS that present a pretty convincing case for this interpretation, at least to me. Here's the most recent episode
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5-4/id1497785843?i=100...
or
It's easy to forget that, while they are political appointees, they have to have fairly long careers as acting judges to even qualify for the appointments.
This is objectively false. There are no requirements like this and there have been several appointees throughout history without many, if any, qualifications for the role.
In fact Scalia famously said this coming from a textualist perspective which I think most people can agree with even if they hate him: “ If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach.”
This seems absolutely correct, but when is the last time ypu ever saw a commentator observe this? Critique has been reduced to “i dont like the effect so the interpretation of the law is wrong.” Put the other way, a fair observer must eventually say “i really hate the conclusion but they got it right.”
They should be doing what is right for the American people. There are clearly laws on the books today which infringe on individual freedoms (abortion), harm society as a whole (citizens united), etc.
The 'justice system' is supposed to be the government branch protecting the little guy from powerful elites. I've not often seen that. I see the opposite. If the legal system won't deliver justice, well, people are going to take things into their own hands whether that's 'justice' or not. If you bury your child, and you see the people ultimately responsible get away with it, I'm not sure I could really blame them.
The justice system. Not necessarily the courts. Our courts definitely weren’t designed to be a political body.
The court is not a democratic institution and exists to uphold the textual rule of law as determined by lawmakers. If a pragmatic ruling by the court can circumvent a politically logjammed congress, so be it. But the courts deciding what is right or wrong for the American people is a very slippery slope that leads to disaster. And a court that just rules against the (existing) elite every time is a junta.
Both sides have their merit, but some people want to have it both ways - do you want pragmatic judges or more democracy? They can often be mutually exclusive.
Except when it came to "textualism vs pragmatism", I've seen that the "textualist" judges have, in many cases, no problem being "pragmatists" when it suits their desired outcome on an issue.
For example, when Scalia dissented in some famous gay rights cases (I'm thinking of Lawrence v Texas specifically) his basic disgust at the thought of same sex relations was laid bare. Ironically, in Lawrence v Texas his dissent was basically correct - striking down laws against sodomy was a step towards gay marriage - but the gist of his argument was that gay marriage was such a god awful, horrible, unthinkable thing that any decision that allowed it must be prima facie wrong. He was basically warning "This decision will force us to allow gay marriage" as if, instead of that being a good thing, it was akin to allowing the apocalypse.
Scalia also authored the 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, a major second amendment case that held, for the first time, that individuals had a private right to own guns (not just "a well-regulated militia"). Read up on that case, as tons of "conservative" judicial scholars argued that it was "pulled from thin air" just as much as Roe v Wade was. From the Wikipedia page:
> Richard Posner, judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, compares Heller to Roe v. Wade, stating that it created a federal constitutional right that did not previously exist, and he asserts that the originalist method – to which Justice Antonin Scalia claimed to adhere – would have yielded the opposite result of the majority opinion.
>> The text of the amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or other sport, or for the defense of person or property. It is doubtful that the amendment could even be thought to require that members of state militias be allowed to keep weapons in their homes, since that would reduce the militias' effectiveness. Suppose part of a state's militia was engaged in combat and needed additional weaponry. Would the militia's commander have to collect the weapons from the homes of militiamen who had not been mobilized, as opposed to obtaining them from a storage facility? Since the purpose of the Second Amendment, judging from its language and background, was to assure the effectiveness of state militias, an interpretation that undermined their effectiveness by preventing states from making efficient arrangements for the storage and distribution of military weapons would not make sense.
Majority
Neil Gorsuch (Rep.)
Samuel A. Alito Jr (Rep)
Clarence Thomas (Rep)
Ketanji Brown Jackson (Dem)
Amy Coney Barrett (Rep)
=======
Minority
John G. Roberts(Rep)
Sonia Sotomeyer(Dem)
Elena Kagan(Dem)
Brent Kavanagh(Rep)
Whats really surprising is how Gorusch is quite the wildcard, he also authored the majority decision that said that 1/2 of Oklahoma belongs to Native Americans - https://www.npr.org/2020/07/09/889562040/supreme-court-rules...
Nah… thats unthinkable
“Supreme Court NUKES Hunter Biden Laptop Conspiracy in BRUTAL Ruling” (with “NUKES” and “BRUTAL” in obligatory red font.)
Ask good lawyers about their thoughts on SCOTUS Justices, it's not always peachy.
Honestly though, for as much flak as this current court gets, there is at least a certain consistency where they at least mostly stick to arguments about the letter of the law. In previous courts you would see some truly wild written arguments about how, like, a specific word in the Commerce Clause or whatever could mean whatever you wanted it to.
See Pierson v. Ray (1967)
I haven't responded that way in the past but was responded to that way a couple of days ago and guess it took hold. I can see why you have to clamp down on it, it easily spreads.
Not so true of this incarnation of SCOTUS. It's amazing when they dont delay or rule (by majority) via ridiculous interpretation.
As detestable as I find the outcome, Roe v. Wade built a right to privacy out of whole cloth where none existed before, and whether that was good law has been hotly debated ever since it was decided (https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ref...). It's within the purview of SCOTUS to go "This was bad lawcraft done by our predecessors, and we reverse it based on this reasoning..."
We can disagree with their reasoning, but my main point is you rarely see a ruling from SCOTUS that is nakedly "Because I said so," even though that's de facto the power they have. The initial Roe decision was shaky. "That was a shaky decision, so we have reversed it" was at most equally shaky. It's hard to argue that one is well-reasoned and the other not (though I think there's room to disagree on what facts the two Courts considered).
There are some partisan hacks on the bench and the institution’s legitimacy is in pretty bad shape.
But in this case they got an issue that didn’t have as much partisan alignment so maybe they did some good work.
(The other source, to my eyes, of questions of legitimacy is that the appointment of three judges in a narrow amount of time under one party's dominance of Congress and the Presidency has fundamentally shifted the "flavor" of the way the Court interprets law. Rather than bringing their legitimacy into question, that's rather the point of the process by which the US appoints Justices and the length of their term; the Court's "personality" is stable over long stretches of time, but it can shift and it does go through eras. People complaining about the new era don't seem to realize that for many Americans, the previous era was strange times that called to question in their minds the legitimacy of the Court).
Oral arguments are the lawyers making arguments. The justices ask questions and collect answers. Their proofs are in their opinions.
Your post would be fine without that first bit.