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What would a weekend be without a couple of conservative Supreme Court justices whining to audiences that despite all the wins they have racked up in major cases the last few years, they are still the biggest victims to trudge barefoot, bleeding and starving across the dusty and fractured American hellscape since the Five Tribes were driven along the Trail of Tears?
Actually, that would be a hell of a nice weekend, but that is not the world we live in. Instead we have to listen to the likes of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito taking a break from their billionaire-funded globetrotting luxury vacations to complain about people being so darn mean to them. Or we get a dose of the self-righteous Brett Kavanaugh musing that sure, everyone hates SCOTUS now, but we’ll appreciate them more in 50 years, presumably after generations of women have died from botched abortions, no one can leave the house without putting on a stillsuit, and Barron Trump has been appointed to his fourth consecutive presidential term in office.
First up was Kavanaugh, who sat for an hourlong question-and-answer session on Friday night at the 5th Circuit Court’s annual judicial conference. This is the very conservative appeals court that wingnuts use to smuggle all their worst cases up to the Supreme Court, so it was presumably pretty friendly territory for Justice Beer Goggles. And sure enough, he used a few softballs to reassure the conference attendees that they are not so out of touch, it’s the children who are wrong:
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Friday that U.S. history shows court decisions unpopular in their time later can become part of the “fabric of American constitutional law.”
Right up until a future court decides they’re not!
Kavanaugh said some high court decisions from the 1950s and ‘60s on monumental issues spanning civil and criminal rights, free speech and school prayer — including the iconic Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal segregation in public schools — were unpopular when they were issued.
“The Warren court was no picnic for the justices. … They were unpopular basically from start to finish from ’53 to ’69,” Kavanaugh said.
Yeah, and Barf Beerface there has helped reverse quite a few of those decisions despite their modern popularity. He helped gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Warren court almost immediately had had to uphold in a raft of cases beginning with South Carolina v. Katzenbach in 1966. He also helped roll back Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 case that banned prayer in public schools. Just to name, off the top of our head, two of those then-unpopular decisions that nonetheless became part of the fabric of American constitutional law before Kavanaugh and his ideological cohort got their grubby fingers on them.
We cannot help but notice that Kavanaugh also stops this recounting just before 1973 and the landmark Roe v. Wade, which Barf Beerface helped overturn despite the fact that it retains majority support in America 50 years later.
It is also very disingenuous of Kavanaugh to claim that decisions that took away rights will one day be as popular as decisions that confirmed and expanded those rights, but to be fair, maybe he had just had too many beers (he likes beers) when he said it.
At around the same time Kavanaugh was pretending everyone except him is really stupid, Clarence Thomas was at a different judicial conference, this one for the also-very-conservative 11th Circuit, whining about how an obviously corrupted Supreme Court justice and his coup-plotting wife just can’t get a break from the public:
“I think there’s challenges to that. We’re in a world and we — certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been — just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible,” Thomas said.
A mere two paragraphs later, we got this reminder of why people have been nasty to the poor, put-upon justice:
Thomas has faced criticisms that he took accepted luxury trips from a GOP donor without reporting them. Thomas last year maintained that he didn’t have to report the trips paid for by one of “our dearest friends.” His wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, has faced criticism for using her Facebook page to amplify unsubstantiated claims of corruption by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
Boy, you accept a few paid-for luxury vacations from a billionaire who might have business before your court, or you try to overthrow one teeny-tiny presidential election (and really, boosting claims of corruption about Joe Biden on Facebook was the least of Ginni Thomas’s coup-happy actions around the election), and people never let you forget it.
Thomas also bellyached about how Washington is so awful, his only escape is to connect with more salt-of-the-earth Americans by parking his RV in their vicinity:
“Especially in Washington, people pride themselves in being awful,” he said. “It’s a hideous place, as far as I’m concerned. Because the rest of the country, it’s one of the reasons we like R.V.-ing, you get to be around regular people who don’t pride themselves in doing harmful things, merely because they have the capacity to do it.”
Look, we know this simply isn’t true. For one thing, even his RV is not really a regular RV, but rather a luxury motor coach gifted to him by a wealthy friend.
For another thing, if any of this were true, the Thomases wouldn’t spend vacations hanging out at Harlan Crow’s exclusive luxury Adirondacks resort, or sailing around Indonesia on Harlan Crow’s luxury yacht. They would spend their vacations parking the RV in some national park campground, setting out some camp chairs and grilling hot dogs on a portable hibachi like the polite and good-hearted Americans they allegedly love so much.
Clarence Thomas is on stage telling bald-faced lies, but he can get away with it because it is a friendly crowd of fellow wingnuts who are apparently happy to indulge his constant pity parties.
Finally there was Justice Sam Alito, taking a break from his own luxury fishing vacations to give a commencement speech at Franciscan University in Ohio on Saturday. What worries Alito these days, besides maybe the levels of mercury poisoning in Alaskan salmon?
“Support for freedom of speech is declining dangerously, especially where it should find deepest acceptance,” he said.
A university, he said, should be “a place for reasoned debate.” But he added that “today, very few colleges live up to that ideal.”
So Alito supports the pro-Palestinian protesters who keep getting beaten up, arrested, and ordered by their own universities to shut up?
“Freedom of religion is also imperiled,” he said. “When you venture out into the world, you may well find yourself in a job or a community or a social setting when you will be pressured to endorse ideas you don’t believe or to abandon core beliefs. It will be up to you to stand firm.”
Of course no one is asking Sam Alito to, say, endorse the idea of abortion, but rather to not let his religious belief that it’s a sin to interfere with other people’s belief — sometimes religious beliefs, even! — that it is not.
In other words, maybe Alito could not force his own religious beliefs on the rest of us instead of the vice versa he believes society to be laboring under? This is the sort of obvious conundrum that we cannot apparently expect a justice of the Supreme Friggin’ Court to wrestle with.
We hope all three justices were able to recover their composure in time to return to work this week and take away some more rights while thumbing their noses at the public and then whining about our ingratitude. It would be a shame if they were so distracted they forgot to give Donald Trump impunity to commit crimes or something.
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