cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44407468
Chief Justice John Roberts warned against personal attacks on the judiciary, telling an audience Tuesday that while criticism of opinions is fair game, “personally directed hostility” is dangerous and must stop.
Roberts did not mention Donald Trump by name and, as he so often does, he went out of his way to stress that the attacks he was referring to were coming from “not just any one political perspective.” However, the chief justice’s admonishment came weeks after Trump said that justices who ruled against his sweeping tariffs were an “embarrassment to their families.”
Once again, I will mention that “originalism” and “textualism” were a fucking death knell for jurisprudence, which barely withstood Bush et al, to say nothing of a brazen bad actor like Trump. They are the dark side of legal reasoning: quicker, easier, more seductive, but once you go down that dark path (with a ritually worshipped constitution that was a nice bit of kit for its time and place but is maddeningly vague and almost impossible to amend), forever will they dominate your destiny.
It’s impractical and deeply, inherently regressive to think that a few clever slaveholding provincials had everything figured out forever and ever (see also the almost impossible to amend part), and pretending that it’s workable without applying thought and context should be grounds to get someone disbarred.
I might at least have the stomach for these philosophies if they promised some kind of judicial consistency or a tangible stare decisis. Instead, it’s pure Calvinball. The courts read the same statutes and precedents in polar opposite ways, purely based on the ideological shifts in conservative media.
Sure. But then you’ve got guys like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito taking bribes in the open from oligarchs intent on extorting the modern day working class. And you realize its not the latter day slaveholders who are calling the shots.