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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently wrote that her colleagues are playing “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” and that in this version of the game where rules are made up as the game goes along, “this Administration always wins.” The disregard for legal precedent seems to be business as usual for the Roberts Court majority, whose decisions it appears are often based on a Ouija board game of originalism, in which the spectral finger of Founders long dead always points to novel conservative fabrications.
The twist is that through overuse of the “shadow docket,” the court needn’t go through the motions of oral argument or of decisions based on legal precedent. The court has removed our only access to its workings. Now, it seems, everything the Republican administration wants is by definition urgent and the Roberts Court proclaims its unsigned diktats by fiat.
In the U.S., an independent judiciary hangs by the thread of lower court jurists. Jurists whom Justice Neil Gorsuch castigated for making Supreme Court interventions necessary in Trump cases, because of bad behavior by lower courts, a view backed by law professor Adrian Vermeule. I see no evidence of bad behavior by lower court judges deciding against the Trump administration. Instead, justices who support the anti-constitutional ” unitary executive” and have granted President Donald Trump broad immunity, are jumping in feet first.
I believe right-wing extremists are paving the way for an American totalitarianism. And they resent anyone and anything that gets in their way. Including the Constitution and the jurists who still abide by it.
Annlinn Kruger
Bar Harbor
