https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/opinion/stephen-breyer-friendship-court.html#:~:text=Guest%20Essay-,Stephen%20Breyer%3A%20The%20Supreme%20Court%20I%20Served,Was%20Made%20Up%20of%20Friends&text=Justice%20Breyer%20is%20a%20retired,Chose%20Pragmatism%2C%20Not%20Textualism.%E2%80%9D
("Stephen Breyer: The Supreme Court I Served on Was Made Up of Friends")
While the sentiments of Justice Breyer are well intended, respectfully I suggest his head is very deeply planted in the sand. Wake up and smell the odor of democracy on the brink.
The demise of Roe v Wade and the matters that have followed in its wake did not happen without severe intended consequence. The expansion of Second Amendment rights beyond any pretzel shaped reading did not occur by itself. The Court now entertaining the specious argument of Mr. Trump's immunity from prosecution, effectively pushing examination of his worst actions to a date that may never come to pass, does grave and possibly irreparable damage to our most fundamental precepts.
The Supreme Court has become far less a final resting place for arguments that fly in the face of precedent and logic, and more than ever an arm of a political policy that has shaken this nation to its core.
The Republican party did not prevent the appointment of a Justice in the last year of the Obama presidency by accident. Nor did it elevate Justice Coney Barrett to the Supremes in the final days of the Trump years without purpose. In fact, if there is one matter beyond all others that Mr. Trump would look to with his version of pride, it is tipping the Court in his favor.
What the Supreme Court definitely does not need is cordial lunches and group trips to hockey games or the opera. What it does require is an understanding that a cup of tea together will not be the cure for the most serious of illnesses that threatens all our futures.
I wish there was a legal way of holding the Supremes responsible for negligence and incompetence, both criminal and civil. I doubt there is.
Ever since Bush V Gore this court has tilted away from democratic principles.