In light of the continuing series I’ve borrowed from Casey Sullivan and FindLaw.com (and added to and commented upon) — the 13 worst Supreme Court decisions — I saw these two items in SCOTUSblog.
They’ll give you an idea about what sort of hope we should hold out for just decisions from this Supreme Court, now that Gorsuch is on it:
- In The Economist, Steven Mazie asks whether, with “Neil Gorsuch now in Antonin Scalia’s old chair and retirement rumours flying about Anthony Kennedy, the 80-year-old perennial swing justice,” “Chief Justice Roberts [could] be emerging as the court’s new median vote,” noting that although a “wider look at … Roberts’s record does not suggest even-handedness,” “in one of the most politicised eras of the Supreme Court’s history, the chief seems keen to tamp down public perceptions that the court, too, is bitterly partisan.”
- At The Faculty Lounge, Calvin TerBeek unpacks “a rather remarkable speech Justice Alito gave at the Claremont Institute in early February,” in which, “[i]n addition to setting forth a robust constitutional conservatism—not, notably, couched in the narrative of originalism–Alito also explicitly advocated for the larger conservative political agenda, in the process invoking decades-old resentments and through lines in postwar conservatism.”
To give you an idea of my own range of hope, I’m categorizing this post as “the god problem,” “the American war on women,” and “the war on workers.”
Oh, yeah, and “voting rights.” And maybe “the filthy rich,” and of course “The Koch Bros Final Solution to Democracy.”
Certainly “strictly for bitter laughter.”