Justice is supposed to instill a sense of deep respect in the citizenry and, one hopes, temper the partisanship of politicians.īut here, only a small percentage of Americans, when asked, express a great deal of confidence in their high court. An approval rating of between 40 and 50 per cent is the typical response. It's perhaps no surprise then that poll after poll suggests significant numbers of Americans disapprove of how the court does its job. Bush the election over Al Gore, who had won a greater share of the popular vote.Īs for Scalia, he's so nonchalantly partisan - or else feels so above it all - that he famously went on a duck-hunting trip with Dick Cheney, in 2004, even as the court was deliberating on an appeal that the Republican vice-president had just lodged. The court's partisanship was never more questioned than when it stopped the 2000 election recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, thereby handing George W. To him, it seems, there is little practical point to the court actually sitting. Thomas has said he sees little if any value in bothering with oral arguments. Thomas, who is married to a prominent conservative activist with ties to the Tea Party, is as reliably right wing as Ruth Bader Ginsburg is left wing, the principal distinction being that Ginsburg participates in arguments made before the court. As of April, he hadn't asked a question in open court in six years, something he takes pride in. Only one of the nine, Justice Anthony Kennedy, tends to vote issue-by-issue rather than ideologically, which makes him appear the only consistently independent thinker on the court.Īs a result, he is often the tiebreaker, effectively giving him the final say over laws passed by legislatures and signed by presidents and governors.īy contrast, Justice Thomas sits on the bench in silence, looking bored and irritated. On the right, Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Scalia. On the left, justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Routinely, the court splits along partisan lines in the same manner as this country's dysfunctional, no-compromise Congress. Rush Limbaugh immediately cheered, using Scalia's 'boggle the mind' quote to rally his millions of right-wing radio followers.īut what seems just as mind-boggling, at least to my non-American mind, is the utter predictability of the U.S. He saw Obama's comment on TV, presumably, and it irritated him, so he decided to enter it into high court jurisprudence. What's more, in taking the shot at Obama's statements at a news conference, Scalia wasn't even dealing with evidence before the court. Justice Antonin Scalia, shown here delivering a 2010 speech in which he castigated lawmakers for being lazy and creating fuzzy laws that the courts had to sort out. In fact, the quote is from a written dissent handed down Monday by Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. In this case, though, the commentator was no cable-TV talking head. You can tune into Fox News Channel, or Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and hear that sort of stuff pretty much daily. An illegal is an illegal, and that's that.

Never mind that many of them are also parents of children who hold American citizenship, having been born here. A few mocking shots at Obama, leavened into a rather black-and-white view of what to do with the 11 million 'illegal aliens,' mostly Hispanics, who perform the vital service of doing America's scut work: toilet-cleaning, diaper-changing, ditch-digging, lawn-tending, etc. Pretty typical conservative punditry, really. 'To say, as the court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.'

The commentator, a legal expert highly esteemed by the nativist base of the Republican party, then went further, lacing into the majority on the Supreme Court for blocking Arizona's attempts to round up and further criminalize large numbers of illegal immigrants, Monday's decision having held that immigration is a federal jurisdiction. 'Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so.' 'The president said at a news conference that the new program is 'the right thing to do' in light of Congress's failure to pass the administration's proposed revision of the Immigration Act,' declared the commentator. commentator, discussing President Barack Obama's new immigration plan, the one that skirts Congress and offers temporary work permits to those illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. Consider this quote from a prominent U.S.

Rush limbaugh mocks ruth bader ginsburg