No Shame

Supreme Court justices like to pretend that they are non partisan. There is nothing farther from the truth. They are anything but. This particular MAGA Supreme Court is very much in favor of the Unitary Executive, granting the President powers to fire Congressional appointees, thwart the legislatures and lower courts, and put their oversized thumbs on the judicial scales, unless of course, the President happens to be a Democrat.

They like to say that their decision making is not for Trump but for all Presidents. Balderdash. They blocked Biden at every opportunity.

During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden experienced a sustained series of defeats at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose ascendant conservative majority blew holes in his agenda and dashed precedents long cherished by American liberals.

Despite the Biden administration's efforts to preserve it, the court - which has six conservative justices and three liberals - in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had recognized a constitutional right to abortion. The court in 2023 rejected race-conscious admissions policies defended by his administration that long had been used by colleges and universities to increase their numbers of Black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, it expanded gun rights, rejecting his administration's position, and similarly in 2024 it invalidated a federal ban on "bump stock" devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.

The justices blocked Biden's $430 billion student loan relief plan in 2023. They also limited the Environmental Protection Agency's reach as part of a series of rulings curbing the power federal regulatory agencies.During Biden's term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, called the major questions doctrine, that gives judges broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions of "vast economic and political significance" unless it is deemed that Congress clearly authorized them.

The court invoked this doctrine to block the student debt relief plan that Biden had promised as a candidate in 2020 and to roll back the EPA's authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.

"The environmental law and student loan cases show how disdainful the court is of Democratic executive action, precisely because the lack of congressional movement means that executive action remains the only avenue for any kind of policy progress in the U.S.," Cornell Law School professor Gautam Hans said.

In another blow to federal regulatory power, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that had given deference to U.S. agencies in interpreting laws they administer, again ruling against Biden's administration. This doctrine, known as "Chevron deference," had been long opposed by conservatives and business interests.

One of the ways the court gets to show their bias is through the Emergency or shadow docket.

This article by the New York Times Adam Liptak, now two months old, illustrates the phenomenon in spades.

In the 17 cases in which the Biden administration sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court over four years, for instance, Justice Kavanaugh voted in its favor 41 percent of the time, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

By contrast, in the 19 cases in which the court has ruled on applications from the second Trump administration, Justice Kavanaugh voted for the administration 89 percent of the time. That amounted to a 48-percentage-point gap in favor of President Trump.

Not just Kavanaugh of course. Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito are even worse.

On the far right side of the court, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted with the Trump administration 95 percent of the time and the Biden administration just 18, for a gap of 77 percentage points.

Hell of a way to run a country. No wonder faith in the law and the Supreme Court is at an all time low.  And so obviously is intellectual integrity.

Less than four in ten Americans has any faith in the court. Only 20% think the court is politically neutral. Not hard to see why. The Federalist Society really knows how to game the system, don't they? Cookie cutter justices delivering again and again for the home team.

Now the Court has ruled that Texas can use extreme gerrymandered districts that marginalize minority voting power even though the lower courts found ample evidence that race was the determining factor in creating them.

Their ruling was laughable:

...the court’s conservative majority allowed Texas to use voting maps made to disadvantage Democrats in the 2026 election, without a hint of constitutional difficulty. To the contrary, the majority chastised a lower court for not taking the state at its word that politics, not race, motivated the maps. The court, it said, had “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith.”

Take the state at its word? We are talking about Texas.

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Trump has wasted little down putting his cheesy, bougie gilded imprimatur on every landmark and once noble institution he can get a hold of. 

From demolishing the East Wing to create a glitzy low class ballroom that almost doubles the White House, to changing the name of the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center, or worse, to trying to put his own orange visage on a coin, to ridding the Park Service of a free pass on MLK Day and substituting his own birthday, his tawdry angling for a Nobel prize, he has absolutely no shame. 

And I don't know about you but the poor guys on boats off Venezuela, has anybody yet seen evidence of any drugs on the boat? I haven't. You think we can take our government at its word? I've got an orange bridge to sell you.

I wouldn't be surprised if the murdered men were out for a mere pleasure cruise.