Dereliction of Duty

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, has fewer admirers than my hometown municipal court. Lowest approval rating in the history of the nation.

Is it any surprise? Two of the justices are men who should never be allowed around women. One of the women they shouldn’t be allowed around literally signed a pledge fifteen years ago “to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade,” the barbaric legacy that permitted women some measure of control over their bodies which probably at least four of her male colleagues would prefer to see remanded back to men.

The whole process of choosing who is to sit on the Supreme Court for the rest of their life is dragged through the dung of political dogfight, free of even a pretense of picking the best and brightest. Free too, of fidelity to the country’s own Constitution.

Article II, Section 2 of that document requires the President to appoint these judges, “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Both branches of government are commanded to do their duty to the third. Senate leadership refused to do that Constitutional duty when conservative Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t quite make it to Valentine’s Day in 2016. Too close (almost nine months) to the next Presidential election, they said. (Oddly, the next time a Justice died in office — liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 — the same Senate leadership said less than two months before a Presidential election was just fine. So even though Joe Biden slid to election on the Presidential slimetrails of his predecessor, he didn’t get to slide in with a Supreme Court nominee like the other guy did.)

The Executive branch had shrugged its own Constitutional shoulders with a stupid bet that it wouldn’t matter because the great masses of the American people would never vote for a moron. The Merrick Garland nomination died partly because the Democrats forgot about H.L. Mencken.

And that’s how we got to the Supreme Court that pollsters ask how we like them today.

So yeah: is it any surprise?