The Supreme Court is on a collision course with itself, and it’s not clear that the justices even know it. We are now witnessing a five-car pileup of Trump–slash–Jan. 6 cases that will either be heard by the Supreme Court or land on their white marble steps in the coming weeks.
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In the meantime, the justices cannot seem to catch a break when it comes to being caught behaving terribly. In addition to the bottomless evidence of judicial freebies and junkets that were not disclosed by justices bound by both disclosure and recusal rules, the past few weeks have brought bombshell reporting from ProPublica about the ways in which the body meant to police the court was mostly just laying around the henhouse hoping for a good scratch behind the ears.* Then this week, ProPublica produced another in-depth report of how a bunch of millionaires and conservative activists—afraid that Justice Clarence Thomas might leave the court if he didn’t get a pay raise and nice lifestyle perks—conspired to get him pay raises and lifestyle perks. This effort somehow was blessed by (surprise!) members of Congress; the judiciary’s top administrative official, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and others who understood perfectly that you needn’t hate the player, or the game, you really just need to take him on island cruises to Indonesia to keep him in the league.
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it just isn’t possible to read the stories about 20 years of partisanship, pay-to-play, and the erosion of norms of judicial humility and restraint on the part of the MAGA wing of the court and still feel confident that this is the body to which one wants to entrust the major electoral outcomes of the coming year.
The two stories—political corruption and political cases—are so inextricably connected that one almost wants to weep at the rate at which they have been force-multiplied as disasters in the making in a matter of weeks, and not because the press is out to discredit the high court, but because the court has been so hellbent on discrediting itself and then refusing to cop to it. It’s the political and financial dirty work of two decades, coming to light in the span of one year, that the court has brought on itself at the moment in which it should have been beyond reproach.
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For years, some of the most vocal critics of the court’s ethical lapses, its lack of transparency, and its refusals to take seriously its own brokenness and errors, have warned that the day would come when an election would be decided by a body that has refused to clean house and has blamed the press and the academy for the stench of its own illegitimacy. The worry wasn’t that the court would decide the election; that seems almost inevitable. The worry was that the public, grown weary of the stench, would not abide by their decision.
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