People, bad news! Times columnist Linda Greenhouse finds today’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court severely disappointing. But even a liberal law professor thinks she’s going a bit overboard with her hostility.
Greenhouse, a journalist covering the Supreme Court for thirty years (1978 to 2008), was an avid reporter. When she left the paper’s beat, she wrote “we have, most likely, the Supreme Court we deserve.” Invited to rethink it, she has changed her mind. She attacked Trump’s new conservative justices in her Friday column.
You are correct, unfortunately, but I have to say no.
It’s not that I think the country simply deserves a Supreme Court that happens to agree with me; I was finding plenty to disagree with back in 2008. Justice Samuel Alito had taken Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s place in early 2006,The court that is so divided to the right can be wrenched…..
After decades of liberal legislating from the Supreme Court, things are suddenly dangerous when there is a conservative majority of justices, two of whom were in Greenhouse’s telling were illegitimate anyway.
….we are in a different place now than we were in 2008, and the current term finds the court in a danger zone as a Willing and able to take part in the war for the nation’s soul. Last term’s cavalier treatment, in a case from Arizona, of what remains of the Voting Rights Act sent a frightening signal about whether the court can be counted on to protect democracy from the Republican-led assault now taking place before our eyes. We have now justices seemingly unscathed by any process or precedent. Let’s not forget that two of Donald Trump’s three appointments arrived under debatable circumstances, with Justice Neil Gorsuch taking a seat in 2017 that was Barack Obama’s to fill and Justice Amy Coney Barrett being jammed through to confirmation late in 2020.
Inadvertently, she argued that the Supreme Court should confirm abortion as a constitutional rights because public polling supports it (slavery was also popular in the United States once).
However, what we observe from the court does not reflect humility. It is, rather, a complete lack of awareness about current situations. According to polls, the majority of Americans are opposed to Roe v. Wade being overturned. The court is giving every indication it will in the coming six months.….
Even a Times Sunday book reviewer, liberal Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, thinks Greenhouse’s new book on the death of Justice Ginsburg and addition of Justice Barrett goes overboard in condemnation of Barrett, while jumping the gun on the frighteningly conservative court.
Maybe because it’s hard to write a drama in which the villain hasn’t done anything terrible yet, Greenhouse makes an uncharacteristic misstep in a brief excursus that compares the new justice to the late Phyllis Schlafly….her anti-feminist crusade against women in the workplace sits oddly with Barrett’s lifelong pursuit of a full-time career as a law professor and judge while raising seven (no, that’s not a typo) children. Greenhouse says that Schlafly’s only motivating factor is that she was once the subject of a mini-series on television in 2020. Both were large family lawyers. “Forty years later, more than a few people looked at Amy Coney Barrett and saw Phyllis Schlafly,” Greenhouse writes, with no indication of who those people were. “And how could they not, given the similarity in the two women’s biographies?” This isn’t even guilt by association. It’s guilt by free association.
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