Why Should We the People Respect a Court That Disrespects the People?

Mitch McConnell, the perpetually sour old goose who heads the Senate Republican Caucus, had a hissy fit when the news leaked out that American women are about to have their most fundamental constitutional right taken from them by a cabal of Supreme Court judges. What made Mitch twitch, of course, was not the bad news for women… but the leak. He huffed that revealing the right-wing Court’s scheme to the public was a “stunning breach,” spewing that it’s “an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court.” Uh, Mitch… the so-called Supremes have been meeting behind closed doors specifically to plot an all-out attack on the independence of some 170 million women to control their own bodies. Why aren’t you opposing the secrecy, rather than supporting the Court’s subversion of women’s liberty? Perversely, the entire Republican leadership is outraged by the leak, rather than the attack on women. Right-wing blowhard Ted Cruz, for example, yapped that informing the public “will do lasting damage to the integrity of the Court.” Uh, Ted… you and your ideological ilk annihilated the Court’s integrity – and its legitimacy – when you stacked it with a covey of corporate-coddling partisan hacks like Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas. Then came Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a Trump acolyte, ludicrously blathering that the leak of the judicial plan is “despicable.” Why? Well, he explained to us commoners, the Court “is not a political body.” If ignorance is bliss, Mike must be ecstatic! The GOP majority on this court is so immersed in its own partisan biases that it is routinely ruling against workers, the environment, women, voting rights, local communities… and democracy itself. No surprise then that public trust in the integrity of these “arbiters of justice” is crashing. If the Court won’t respect our democratic ideals, the people won't respect the Court.