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It wasn’t enough for the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority to close the term with a rash of cruel decisions. No, Chief Justice John Roberts and his GOP colleagues also had to whine about how their dissenting Democratic colleagues disagreed.
In addition to the right-wing decisions themselves, this toxic mixture of arrogance and victimhood will carry through to next term and beyond.
Roberts displayed his noble tone-policing in the student loan case, Biden v. Nebraska, in which the majority concocted standing for supposedly aggrieved red states and used an invented doctrine to strike down debt relief for millions of people. Justice Elena Kagan pointed out the erroneous rationale on both fronts in her dissent.
“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” Kagan wrote.
“The majority’s opinion begins by distorting standing doctrine to create a case fit for judicial resolution,” she added, explaining that Roberts’ ruling “ends by applying the Court’s made-up major-questions doctrine to jettison the Secretary’s loan forgiveness plan.”
So in a case that, as Kagan noted, was “not a case,” the majority overrode “the combined judgment of the Legislative and Executive Branches, with the consequence of eliminating loan forgiveness for 43 million Americans.”
Roberts, for his part, wasn’t content to merely wield power when it came to the decision itself.
Roberts, for his part, wasn’t content to merely wield power when it came to the decision itself. He also felt the need to use the pages of a Supreme Court majority opinion to complain about how the powerful majority was being criticized.
“It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary,” the chief justice whined.
Yet, as voting rights lawyer Marc Elias observed Thursday on “Deadline: White House,” what’s “disturbing” about Roberts’ critique is the chief justice laying blame with dissenters questioning the court, instead of the majority doing the work of convincing the public that it's right.
If the Supreme Court has dismal approval ratings, Elias said, that’s not the dissent’s fault but, rather, the majority’s failure “to articulate and persuade and convince the American public that it is in fact showing fealty to the Constitution.”
That makes it even harder to care about Roberts’ weird complaint in his opinion denying loan relief, in which he took pains to make clear that the majority doesn’t mistake “plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement.” He said it’s “important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.”
Making those comments even weirder is that Kagan, in her dissent, responded by emphasizing that when she criticizes the majority strongly, she doesn’t “disparage” her colleagues. There’s “surely nothing personal in the dispute here,” she wrote, making Roberts’ lecture seem even more paranoid and unnecessary.
More importantly, as I noted when the decision came down, who cares if it is personal or if the justices disparage one another? It’s almost hard to believe that Roberts would think people care about powerful people’s feelings rather than the harmful effects of the court’s rulings.
It makes more sense, however, to view Roberts’ superficial concern for national unity as yet another exercise in power — a power that the majority will continue to wield into next term and beyond.