Saturday, June 27, 2015

The Supreme Court's voting bloc

Andrew McCarthy: "Let’s Drop the Charade: The Supreme Court Is a Political Branch, Not a Judicial One."  On the Court's liberal members:
And it is not so much that they move in lockstep. It is that no one expects them to do anything but move in lockstep — not their fellow justices, not the political branches, and certainly not the commentariat, right or left.

It is simply accepted that these justices are not there to judge. They are there to vote. They get to the desired outcome the same way disparate-impact voodoo always manages to get to discrimination: Start at the end and work backwards. Guiding precedents are for the quaint business of administering justice. In the social justice business, the road never before traveled will do if one less traveled is unavailable.
I was thinking about this too: didn't a single one of these justices, just one out of four, look at the text of the Obamacare law and say: "gee, it says State and 'State' is defined as one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.  Maybe there's something to this case."  But no.

What's perhaps worse, they didn't even feel like they had to explain themselves:
In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor.
And why should they?  As McCarthy writes: they're there to vote, not to provide judicial reasoning.

Extra - From Power Line.

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