They behave like they think they're royalty, between lifetime appointments and the unwillingness or inability of Congress to control or "regulate" them.
No other federal court in the nation, for example, would allow a defendant in a case before them to fly a judge on a private Gulfstream luxury jet to a luxury hunting retreat in Louisiana and then, a week later, watch as that judge rules in that defendant's favor.
But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did exactly that when Dick Cheney was sued for allegedly lying about his secret "energy group" that was planning the seizure and sale of Iraq's oil fields as he and Bush lied us into the war that opened those oil fields up to exploitation.
No other federal court would allow a judge to give a speech before a group that was funding a case before them and then rule in favor of that group's openly stated goal, but that's exactly what Neal Gorsuch did when he addressed a group funded by the Bradley Foundation that was helping finance the Janus v AFSCME case that gutted union protections for government workers based on constitutional interpretation.
No other federal court would allow a judge to swear revenge against a particular nonprofit corporation (in this case the Democratic Party), saying in his confirmation hearings that, "What goes around comes around," and then rule in cases directly affecting that organization (like gutting voting rights by citing the Constitution) but Brett "Beerbong" Kavanaugh did just that.
No other federal court would allow a judge to rule on a case where he owned a half-million dollars' worth of stock in the company presenting amicus arguments before the court -- it's illegal in many states -- but John Roberts did just that in the ABC v Aereo case. As did Roberts, Breyer, and Alito in 25 of 37 other cases where they owned stock, according to the good-government group Fix The Court.
No other federal court would allow a judge's wife to openly interact with and advocate for the interests of dozens of litigants before the court over decades, and take nearly a million dollars from a group regularly helping bring cases before his court, but Clarence Thomas and his wife have done both, as revealed in a shocking New York Times profile.
And now the Court has even gutted the EPA -- the agency Justice Gorsuch's mother infamously ran into the ground before resigning in disgrace during the Reagan administration -- using Gorsuch's own bullshit "textualist" interpretation of the Constitution to go after the agency on behalf of a fossil fuel industry that is actively killing our planet to make money.
In addition, these Republican appointees are openly shooting down Democratic efforts to fight gerrymandered maps while supporting GOP efforts to impose them on states. And don't get me started on the Republicans on the Court legalizing voter-roll purges in 2018.
Is there no way, to paraphrase Shakespeare, to rid ourselves of this Court's corrupt behavior?
It turns out, Congress has that power -- although they haven't used it since Ulysses Grant was president and reorganized the Court.
Article III of the Constitution establishes the federal court system and gives to Congress itself the power to create the lower federal courts. It also requires Congress to regulate the Supreme Court. As noted earlier, Article III, Section 2 says:
"[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."
I've written elsewhere about some of the options available to Congress to deal with an out-of-control Supreme Court. They range from imposing a code of judicial ethics, to expanding the size of the Court, to term limits, to building court-stripping language into legislation like was added to the PATRIOT Act and John Roberts advocated when part of the Reagan administration.
But the major damage the Supreme Court does is when they decide -- based on partisan whim, billionaire gifts, or the rantings of a 17th century Puritan -- that the Constitution means or says something otherwise entirely absent from that document.
This power of judicial review -- the ability of the Court to determine the constitutionality of a law -- is the most potent and, in the hands of a conservative Court for the past 50+ years, has been the most destructive, of the Court's powers.
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