To the scolding "Justices"

A lower-court judge apologized to the (self-described) conservative "Justices" Gorsuch and Kavanaugh after they "suggested that Judge Young subverted the court’s will by failing to apply an earlier emergency order".

Judge Young said on Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.

If you'd been in Judge William G. Young's robes, you might have "erred" in the same way he did. Why? Because those rebuking "Justices" and their colleagues in the majority didn't explain themselves.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with [the] White House in nearly every case it has considered.

But it has done so relatively opaquely through more than a dozen emergency orders — unsigned opinions issued relatively quickly and without oral argument.

Unsigned orders without explanations are no damned help to lower courts when it comes time to puzzle through the Supremes' supposed intentions. Does what the Court's majority hastily "decided" about apples apply to oranges? How the hell should anybody outside the chambers know?

Neil, Brett — we need to speak plainly: may I call you by your first names? — fuck your high dudgeon.

You and your radical brethren (and your occasional sister-in-arms, Amy Coney Barrett) may be in a position to demand the obedience of your fellow robe-wearers, but you have forfeited any right to the respect of the millions of Americans who see through your pretense.

You posture as solons of the Constitution, but you have twisted its plain meaning, and that of many laws, to let an autocrat in the making steamroll over the legal safeguards the people established to prevent autocracy. You are nothing more, nor less, than dictator-enablers. You are fundamentally anti-democratic in your mindset, and as such, you have betrayed your oath to the Constitution you pretend to uphold.

What derailed you and your likeminded colleagues from what I assume was an initial commitment to justice, I don't know. What I do know is, you are on a course that millions of your fellow Americans will neither forgive nor forget.

If you have a shred of decency left, you will step out of your (echo) chambers and look at how the rest of the country sees you and your works.

If you have a heart, you will feel shame. That's okay; in fact, that's absolutely necessary. Only if you truly recognize the magnitude of your mistakes (and their consequences for others) will you find the resolve to fight until you've corrected them.

SCOTUS betrays us again

The right-wing so-called "Justices" of the U.S. Supreme Court has let Elon Musk's DOGE marauders access the highly sensitive personal information held by the Social Security Administration.

The order, which lifts a preliminary injunction wisely granted by a district court (an injunction upheld by a divided Fourth Circuit), was unsigned but noted that Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor did not join the majority. Indeed, the bulk of the text of the order is devoted to their objections; the actual reasons for the majority's decision are entirely absent.

This is not a formal decision of the Court: no trial has even occurred. However, you'd think that a Court majority that gave a shit about its own legitimacy in the public's eyes would have explained why it was throwing caution to the wind and giving a bunch of arrogant, reckless, and totally unsupervised Elon Musk zealots unlimited access to our data.

Consider the Court's own summary of what goes into deciding whether to stay a preliminary injunciton. (So we're all on the same page, the "stay applicant" here is the Trump Administration.)

When considering whether to grant a stay, this Court looks to four factors: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where the public interest lies.” [citations omitted]

What makes the right-wing majority think the administration will succeed on the merits, in advance of a trial and in the absence of any evidence?

What irreparable injury will be inflicted if the DOGE pillagers have to wait a while? It's not like Social Security ion't working (setting aside, that is, the Trump Administration's own near-criminal mismanagement of it). Nor is the mission of DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, so urgent that it can't wait for a judge to review whether or not the administration's wrecking-ball approach to seeking "efficiency" actually passes legal and Constitutional muster.

Considering that "the other parties interested in the proceedings" include every damned citizen of the United States, not to mention lots of legal residents, staying the preliminary injunction — thus, again, permitting the lawless DOGE kids to access some of our most sensitive personal information — sure as hell will "substantially injure" the "other parties". The onus is on the SCOTUS right-wingers to say otherwise.

"Where the public interest lies" is in protecting our sensitive personal information from parties who have no damned business accessing it because they are in no legal jeopardy if they misuse their access. Again, the onus is on the SCOTUS right-wingers to explain why that's not the case.

But of course, those arrogant, dictator-friendly assholes in the right-wing majority on SCOTUS say nothing — literally not one word — to justify their aiding and abetting of Trump's autocratic power grab.

Why? Because they know no justification is possible — not if you believe in democracy and the rule of law, that is.

Which those arrogant, dictator-friendly assholes in the right-wing majority on SCOTUS emphatically do not.

Try again, Clarence

Per a New York Times article headlined, "Justice Thomas Says He Was Advised Lavish Gifts Did Not Need to Be Reported":

Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that he had followed the advice of “colleagues and others in the judiciary” when he did not disclose lavish gifts and travel from a wealthy conservative donor.

In a statement released by the Supreme Court, the justice said he believed he was not required to report the trips.

“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable." ...

What kinds of gifts and travel are we talking about?

ProPublica revealed on Thursday that the justice had traveled by private jet and yacht at the invitation of Harlan Crow, a Texas real estate billionaire. The vacations, which took place over nearly two decades, included trips to Indonesia and to Bohemian Grove, an exclusive retreat nestled in the redwoods in Northern California.

I had seen the ProPublica headline but couldn't bring myself to read the piece. Clarence and Ginny Thomas so disdain public opinion, and are so immune to public pressure, that I figured, why bother raising my blood pressure to no good purpose?

However, Clarence's "they told me it was okay" excuse takes his contempt for public opinion and the public's intelligence to new depths.

Clarence, you know damned well that flying on a private jet isn't like being treated to dinner at Applebee's. That you can't be bothered to muster even the smallest amount of shame for your failure to disclose — that you expect us to swallow the rank excrement of "but 'they' told me it was okay" — is despicable. You have benefited from your past and present colleagues' indifference to the institution's reputation, a reputation which, thanks in no small part to you and your wife, is deservedly in the toilet.

In short, Clarence, you're full of it.

You've pledged to comply with new disclosure guidelines adopted last month. If you do, better late than never. However, I'm betting you'll still find ways to skirt the intention of those guidelines. After all, neither you nor Ginny loves being treated like the little people who have to follow the rules, do you?

Yo, Clarence!

In his concurrence to Samuel "Sammy the Bullshitter" Alito's abomination of a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that ends the federal right to abortion, Clarence Thomas writes:

... in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. ... After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

That's Thomas arguing for rolling back the rights to contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage, respectively.

(By the way, to support his views in his concurrence, Thomas nearly exclusively cites his own words from other decisions, dissents, and concurrences. That he seemingly can't cite other Justices suggests something rather, um, lonesome about his views, doesn't it? That's quite a position for a Supreme Court Justice to find himself in, unable to cite anyone who agrees with him. Even so, he's willing to impose his singular and unrepresentative views on 330-odd million of us. That's some humility and self-restraint you have there, Clarence.)

But I seem to recall another exceedingly controversial — indeed, once-illegal — marriage-adjacent practice, namely, marriage between "the races". What about that, Clarence?

I hear only deafening silence from your corner of the room. However, a bystander is whispering in my ear. What's that? You say Justice Thomas himself is married to a woman considered not of the same race as he? Ohhh. I can see why it might be exceedingly inconvenient for him to broach that topic. Mm, yes.

However, there is such a thing as principle, isn't there, Clarence? It scarcely befits you, a self-proclaimed impartial arbiter of the Constitution and the law, to exempt yourself from your own judgment of what does and doesn't pass Constitutional muster. That would hardly be equal treatment under the law, would it? In fact, exempting yourself from the logical consequences of your judicial principles would make you — perish the thought! — a hypocrite, wouldn't it? And not just any hypocrite, but a hypocrite who has the final word, more or less, on any legal controversy in the land. That's hypocrisy and self-dealing on a level to which most of us can never aspire.

I'm not the only one who noticed that Thomas left out any reference to interracial marriage:

Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff behind the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, said Friday that Justice Clarence Thomas omitted Loving v. Virginia on his list of Supreme Court decisions to "reconsider" because it "affects him personally."

"That affects him personally, but he doesn't care about the LGBTQ+ community," Obergefell said on MSNBC's "The Reid Out."

Harsh. But true, though, eh, Clarence?

In fact, it's not just that you don't care about the LGBTQ+ community, your hidebound religious sect positively loathes that community, doesn't it? You're fine with dumping on that community, or on any practice, like contraception, that offends your sect, aren't you? You and your fellow religious fanatics have no reason other than your religious strictures for going after these activities and people, do you?

Silly me, thinking that the very arbiters of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause would themselves honor that clause as binding on themselves. ("It only mentions Congress, and we're not Congress!!", I hear you cackle in glee.)

But I've wandered from the main point.

The Ninth Amendment of the Constitution states:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

As Justice Kennedy wrote in Lawrence v. Texas:

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

However, as Scalia observed:

... the [Ninth Amendment’s] refusal to ‘deny or disparage’ other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even further removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges’ list against laws duly enacted by the people.

(cited in note 5 of that congress.gov page)

In short, a person with human feeling and empathy will find, as some Justices have, more rights for people in the current Constitutional text. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and their fellow reactionaries who recoil from "the manifold possibilities" of modern life will take those rights away on the grounds that they're not spelled out in the Constitution.

So the only long-term defense against the reactionaries on the Court is to list, with tedious specificity, the rights we want protected, via Constitutional amendments. Otherwise, there's no recourse against the Alitos of the world middle-fingering us.

That goes for your right to marry a woman of a different race, too, Clarence. Don't bet against other federal judges, including your five allies among the current Justices, revisiting that unenumerated right during your lifetime tenure. Even from your lofty perch you must have noticed that white supremacists are out, very loud, and very proud these days. They might like your wife, who puts out authoritarian-friendly noises they can construe to be supportive, but don't assume they like you. If you want your marriage to continue being recognized across state lines, I'd start gathering signatures if I were you. A judge is supposed to avoid political activism but you've never let that stand in your way, so go to it.

Overturning Roe is theocratic

The news has just broken in Politico: "Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows".

We can't say for sure whether the supposed draft opinion actually is what Politico's article claims, namely, work product of the U.S. Supreme Court. If it turns out to be a hoax, well, that will be that.

However, the idea of overturning Roe unquestionably is and has been for decades an obsession of social conservatives. The whole point of the sorry history of recent Court apppointments — and more to the point, denied appointments (the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Mitch McConnell's infamous and indefensible refusal to let Merrick Garland's nomination even be considered by the Senate) — has been for conservatives to appoint reliably anti-Roe Justices until a majority was in place to overturn that decision.

Now, my understanding from TV coverage is that the draft opinion attacks the "weak" Constitutional basis in the reasoning of Roe v. Wade. That has long been a criticism of social conservatives. However, it has always seemed to me a secondary excuse, one cobbled up by social conservatives to cover their real interest: they consider abortion nothing less than murder. That is why the issue is so motivational for them: nothing is as stark as the accusation that murder is being condoned under the law.

Is abortion murder, though?

Science can't tell us when (or if) a human life begins prior to a fetus leaving the womb. (At least, it can't tell us yet; I question if it ever will.) So to stake out the absolutist position that abortion is murder, one has to have a different basis for believing that an unborn fetus is alive.

The only basis for that belief is religion. Specific religious sects hold that abortion is murder.

However, not all religions or sects do. Nor, for that matter, do all nonbelievers. There is not widespread agreement, or even majority agreement, that abortion is murder. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans want abortion of some kind to be legal. Where to draw the line on times and procedures is hotly debated but the principle of access is not.

What will your good-faith belief that abortion is not murder be worth after this decision is issued? Even if that belief is grounded in your own religion's creed, too bad. The free exercise of your religious belief will be illegal.

This purported Supreme Court decision imposes nothing less than the religious beliefs of a minority on the entire population. It turns the logic of protection of minorities on its head — and it perverts the logic of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by enshrining the creed of a handful of religious sects as the law of the land.

That's theocracy.

Justice Thomas, you are fooling no one

You might think United States Supreme Court Justices would be even more scrupulous about avoiding the appearance of impropriety than the average federal judge. You might think someone who had risen to one of the most powerful and prestigious positions in the judicial branch of the U.S. government would be conscientious enough to ensure the example he or she set was an honorable one.

In the case of Clarence Thomas, you'd be wrong.

In January the New Yorker published a lengthy article detailing Justice Thomas' wife Ginni's unprecedented and highly problematic political activism. Now, the New York Times has published its own piece on the Thomases, "The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas".

What does her activism have to do with her husband's day job? The Times gives an example:

... Ginni Thomas co-signed a letter in December [2021] calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the Jan. 6 committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”

A few weeks later, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack. Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.

Nor was the referenced letter Ginni Thomas' first foray into activism. It was only one of many actions she has taken in a long career as a conservative activist.

Her husband's pointed refusal to recuse himself from matters that clearly touch on her activities would have gotten him disciplined long ago if he were an ordinary federal judge. However, the only way to discipline a Supreme Court Justice is impeachment in the Senate, a heavy lift under the best of circumstances and inconceivable as long as the Republican Party is devoid of any principle save blind loyalty to the ex-domestic Dear Leader.

What does Clarence Thomas himself say to critics like me? Again, from the Times:

... Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that while there are no clear-cut rules outlining when justices need to recuse themselves, there are appearance concerns. “I’m sure there are justices’ spouses who have had strong opinions about politics,” Kerr said. “What’s unusual here is that Justice Thomas’s wife is an activist in politics. Historically, this is the first example of something like this that I can think of at the Supreme Court.”

Justice Thomas has flipped such criticisms on their head, saying that those who raise such issues were “bent on undermining” the court.

To repeat: Clarence Thomas says that doubters like me are "bent on undermining" the Court. His psychological projection would be laughable, were we not living in an age where brazen disregard for truth is taken for gospel in some benighted quarters.

Justice Thomas, you're full of it.

You're annoyed at being called out for actually undermining the Court's reputation, so you peddle this horse manure. Heck, you might even believe it.

The rest of us, however, don't. We know better. And we'll make sure history knows you tried to gaslight us.

You aren't fooling anyone.

The myth of nonpartisan justices

Adam Serwer's grim Atlantic piece about SCOTUS is entitled, "The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe".

It opens:

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is offended by those questioning the impartiality of the Supreme Court.

“This Court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she announced at a recent event at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, named for Senator Mitch McConnell. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”

For Barrett to insist on her nonpartisanship at a center named for the legislator whose procedural hardball was instrumental in securing her seat suggests that, although Barrett’s peers have praised her legal mind, her sense of irony leaves something to be desired. ...

Serwer provides a handy timeline of how the so-called "conservative" movement worked for a half-century to tilt the Court so far to the right that it's hard to believe it hasn't tipped over. He doesn't fault the movement for doing this, arguing that that's how politics is played. He does, however, tell the too-pious-for-words Justices trying to maintain the fiction of judicial impartiality (including non-conservative Stephen Breyer) to STFU:

The conservative movement seems to have secured the Court for a generation at least, but that is insufficient. The right-wing justices also demand their decisions be seen as the outcome of dispassionate legal reasoning, not partisan warfare. They do not want the legitimacy of their proclamations, or the institution itself, questioned to the point where their liberal counterparts might consider paths as drastic and radical as the ones they took to get here. They wish to be admired and celebrated as the sagacious intellectual giants they believe themselves to be.

Having reached the heights of the legal profession, it must be deflating for the justices to recognize that the public is not obligated to reflect their self-regard. In truth, the public is simply reciprocating the contempt that the justices show for the people every time they insist on lying to their face about how the Court works, or why it looks the way it does today.

Contempt. Yep, that's what I feel for our would-be Solons. Suck it up, right-wing Justices, because you've more than earned it.

SCOTUS screws us again

Prof. Richard Hasen's op-ed piece in the New York Times well summarizes today's Supreme Court decisions' corrosive effect on voting in the U.S. The headline's not an overstatement: "The Supreme Court is Putting Democracy at Risk".

Of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Hasen writes:

Thanks to Brnovich, a state can now assert an interest in preventing fraud to justify a law without proving that fraud is actually a serious risk, but at the same time, minority voters have a high burden: They must show that the state has imposed more than the “usual burdens of voting.” Justice Alito specifically referred to voting laws in effect in 1982 as the benchmark, a period when early and absentee voting were scarce and registration was much more onerous in many states.

It is hard to see what laws would be so burdensome that they would flunk the majority’s lax test.

I don't know why Alito (I can't bring myself to use the title "Justice": the irony is too bitter) decided 1982 was a good year to set as a baseline but I can't say I'm surprised he went back in time nearly forty years. That's his M.O., to take us as far back as he can convince his fellow reactionaries to go.

With Brnovich, SCOTUS has rendered the 1960s-era Voting Rights Act an empty shell.

The other case, Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta, concerned disclosure of donors to charities. The Court significantly reduced the ability of states (or anyone else) to mandate such disclosure, even for law enforcement purposes (e.g., to detect campaign finance violations). Prof. Hasen explains the impact of today's decision:

In the Americans for Prosperity case, [Chief Justice Roberts] redefined the “exacting scrutiny” standard to judge the constitutionality of disclosure laws so that the government must show its law is “narrowly tailored” to an important government interest. This makes it more like strict scrutiny and more likely that disclosure laws will be struck down. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye.”

The court’s ruling calls into question a number of campaign finance disclosure laws. Perhaps even more significant, it also threatens the constitutionality of campaign contribution laws, which are judged under the “exacting scrutiny” standard, too. Lower courts can now find that such laws are not narrowly tailored to prevent corruption or its appearance or do not provide voters with valuable information — two interests the court recognized in the past to justify campaign laws. A requirement to disclose a $200 contribution? A $500 campaign contribution limit? Plaintiffs in future cases are likely to argue that a law targeting small contributions for disclosure or imposing low contribution limits are not “narrowly tailored” enough to deter corruption or give voters valuable information, even if Congress or a state or municipality found such laws necessary.

I'll let Prof. Hasen describe the combined ugly results:

As in Shelby County and in the 2010 Citizens United case, which struck down Congress’s limit on corporate campaign spending, this conservative Supreme Court in today’s rulings shows no deference to democracy-enhancing laws passed by Congress, states or local governments.

...

If you put the Brnovich and Americans for Prosperity cases together, the court is making it easier for states to pass repressive voting laws and easier for undisclosed donors and big money to influence election outcomes.

The wealthy and powerful (but I repeat myself) already had a vastly disproportionate say over our laws and public policies. The U.S. Supreme Court, courtesy of the reactionary Justices who now dominate it, has strengthened that stranglehold.

Inequity of opportunity, wealth, and access to power has driven this country to a brink not seen since the Civil War. Think I'm exaggerating? Look at any objective assessment of the haves and have-nots in American society today — I recommend Robert Reich's The System — and the yawning gulf between them looks a lot like that which precipitated the French Revolution. (And Reich's book was published before the pandemic had really taken hold. Suffice to say, the pandemic didn't invalidate any of his assessments: it reinforced them.)

With these decisions, the Court has guaranteed that the Republicans who represent a minority of the population will reinforce their grip on power. The Court also has guaranteed that more younger voters will be discouraged from participating in elections — indeed, some of them will conclude that "democracy" is a sham, a rigged game, just as the most poisonous and irresponsible voices on the far right are loudly proclaiming (though for entirely different and false reasons).

The far-right majority in Brnovich cloaked their reasoning in concern for election integrity and public trust in the election process. The effect of that decision, and the indirect effect of Americans for Prosperity, will be to diminish both.

From Citizens United onward, this Court has undermined the body politic through its blinkered obsession with safeguarding the rich and powerful. When the history of the United States is someday written, this Court's contribution to the era's disunity and dysfunction — and perhaps to the nation's downfall as a democracy altogether — will be as infamous as doomed Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake".

Let me offer earliest congratulations on cementing your place in history, right-wing Justices.

Right-wing Justices prioritize religion over science

The U.S. Supreme Court declared New York State's resrictions on religious gatherings unconstitutional (last Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving, if memory serves).

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has a cogent explanation of the 5-4 decision. As he put it, "the court proved the dangers of scientifically illiterate judges overturning government decisions that were based on scientific evidence".

It's too bad the Founders didn't think science worth mentioning alongside speech and religion in the First Amendment. If they had, the blinkered, religiously overzealous right-wing Justices in the majority might have had a harder time excusing their otherwise inexcusable elevation of religion over public health.

I don't care about the devout contracting CoViD-19. That's their choice. Unfortunately, their disregard of public-heatlh guidelines endangers the rest of us, unless they're willing to segregate themselves — and their disregard of our well-being is ethically indefensible.

So to all those pious believers and clergy bleating about how just and noble this boneheaded decision is, and decrying jurisdictions that currently enforce similar restrictions (I'm talking to you, S.F. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, you arrogant twit), I dare you to square your cries of "religious freedom" with the physical health and well-being of the others with whom you share breathing space.

Do your moral precepts let you excuse endangering our health? If so, your religion (or at least the way you practice it) is as ethically bankrupt as I suspected.

If not, you need to disavow the religious authorities, including the demonstrably religiously non-neutral Justices in the majority on this decision, who aren't just elevating religious interests over state ones, but are prioritizing religious interests over our very physical health and well-being.

Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, you have sullied the Court's reputation. You obviously cannot be trusted to restrain your religious zealotry even in the face of sickness and death.

If you were looking for a way to delegitimize both the Court and your own religions, you succeeded, brilliantly.

Barrett joins SCOTUS

Amy Coney Barrett, the anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, religiously radical right-winger who hid her radical religious associations and viewpoints from public scrutiny, wasn't so much "confirmed" as bum-rushed onto the U.S. Supreme Court. In the end her nomination garnered 52 senatorial votes, all Republican. (One Republican honorably voted against her.)

Don Trumpone is counting on Barrett to cement the radical right's hold on SCOTUS, and not incidentally, to support him and his administration in any cases that come before her.

What might such cases be? Hmm. How about any number of Republican challenges to local elections, whose aim will be to suppress likely Democratic voters' ballots?

How about any number of civil or criminal cases alleging Don Trumpone has committed wrongdoing?

How about any number of lawsuits against the Don's administration's policies, like its horrendous treatment of asylum-seekers; or its deployment of pseudomilitary federal forces to municipalities without local or state requests; or its recent change of civil-service rules to permit civil service professionals to be dismissed without cause? (The latter hasn't resulted in lawsuits — yet.)

Now, it must be said that Supreme Court Justices in the past have sometimes disappointed the president that nominated him or her by ruling in ways that don't accord with that president's views. But those past Justices weren't dyed-in-the-wool religionists like Barrett, whose strict and unforgiving Catholicism is extreme even by the standards of the Roman Catholic Church. I'm not counting on Barrett to experience the kind of personal growth exhibited by past Justices like John Paul Stevens. If you've looked at her judicial record, you know her hostility to Supreme Court precedent that cuts against her personal religious views, notably Roe v. Wade. This leopard won't change her spots.

The spectacle of the supersonic rush to get her on the Court, too, sticks in the craw of the majority of those who witnessed the disgusting and flatly unjust spectacle of the Mitch McConnell-supervised stonewalling of Merrick Garland. I trust Barrett will send flowers to McConnell and Trump — not just sometime in the next few days, but every year for her entire tenure on the Court, because she owes them big-time.

Justice Barrett, you join Justice Kavanaugh in my books as a flatly illegitimate member of the Court.

It would be delightful if one day I had occasion to apologize to you because you proved yourself an independent, thoughtful voice for real justice.

But I doubt any apology will be merited.

A question for the chief justice

On Wednesday the 21st, Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked our domestic Dear Leader for claiming a federal judge who issued a decision Don Trumpone didn't like was "an Obama judge". Roberts hewed to the standard line about federal judges being impartial arbiters of the law.

I don't dsiagree with Roberts' vision of the judiciary and the ideals it should uphold. Who could?

Even so, the Supreme Court, the very apex of the judicial branch, is perhaps the most prominent exemplar of a biased judiciary. Everybody speaks of "conservative" and "liberal" justices whose votes on most cases are all but preordained. If it's a hot-button cultural issue, nobody wonders how Samuel Alito or Elena Kagan will vote on the case.

Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings were a national disgrace. The majority of the public did not believe he should have been confirmed. This was not a problem the Court could solve, but the negative consequences will fall on the Court anyway. Those of us who consider Kavanaugh unfit to be a Justice have any number of reasons — provided by the nominee himself — not to trust him. If his temperament as a Justice resembles that on display during his confirmation hearings, we will have ample ammunition for impeachment hearings.

So the question for you, Mr. Chief Justice, is how you will restore faith in your Court.

Mr. Chief Justice, Kavanaugh expressed such outrageously and unapologetically partisan views during his confirmation hearing that millions of Americans rightly wonder how they can possibly receive a fair hearing at his hands. Kavanaugh called the serious allegations of sexual assault leveled against him the handiwork of "liberal" activists and "Clinton" (Bill and Hillary) supporters.

If the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee should find itself a plaintiff or respondent before the Court, how could it expect a fair hearing? Will Justice Kavanaugh recuse himself from the case? If he will not recuse himself on his own, will you use whatever authority you have to compel him?

The Court's reputation is no longer as a nonpartisan institution. If that is the ideal to which you want the Court to aspire, what will you do to bring about that state of affairs?

Most of the nation's problems are not yours to solve. However, we're looking to see how you will address those problems that are yours.

So again, Mr. Chief Justice, how will you restore confidence in the Court?

What we've lost sight of in the Kavanaugh mess

Rich Lowry in Politico and Bret Stephens in the New York Times have penned pieces defending Brett Kavanaugh. Lowry's piece takes issue with the portrayal of Kavanaugh as a liar — but specifically and only about Kavanaugh's purported lies about his alcohol abuse as a young man and about his controversial remarks in his high-school yearbook. Stephens takes on the "bullying" by liberals, focusing heavily on the devastating effects an attempted-rape allegation can have on a man's reputation. Both pundits portray Kavanaugh's accusers and their accusations — and whatever testimony they have been permitted to give — as not credible.

Stephens' outrage prompts him to wonder:

Will a full-bore investigation of adolescent behavior now become a standard part of the “job interview” for all senior office holders? I’m for it — provided we can start with your adolescent behavior, as it relates to your next job.

Without ever saying so, Stephens accuses everyone who opposes Kavanaugh of bad faith. That's essentially the same argument every Kavanaugh supporter has made since Lindsey Graham went on his querulous rant last Thursday. The accusations have no shred of supporting evidence, the witnesses are inconsistent, the accusers are inconsistent, etc., etc.

In all this, the body politic has lost sight of a couple of things.

First, in attempting to defend himself, Kavanaugh went on his own querulous tirade last Thursday. In doing so he manifested a volatile, angry temperament I wouldn't want in a DMV clerk, much less a man who wants to be on the Supreme Court. He also ranted about the accusations of sexual assault against him being a political hit by the left and went so far as to accuse supporters of Bill Clinton of being behind the accusations. How could anyone who isn't manifestly conservative or right-wing possibly expect a fair hearing from a man with such unabashedly partisan bias?

This is something that Kavanaugh himself has had to address in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece today. I haven't read it but it's worth noting that his most partisan remarks were contained in his written statement, prepared prior to the hearing. He didn't blurt out anything spontaneously. He planned his worst remarks!

Second, we seem to have forgotten that Kavanaugh was nominated by Don Trumpone because of the judge's fringe belief that the president of the United States must not be compelled to respond to lawsuits or other judicial proceedings while in office. Kavanaugh is ready to defend our domestic Dear Leader by shielding him from any subpoenas, including but not limited to any that Robert Mueller might serve. Again, this is a fringe view that Kavanaugh has never disavowed, and he shows no discomfort about having been nominated for the Court precisely because he holds this fringe view. He has demonstrated full willingness to be Don Trumpone's lap dog on the Court, having not just met with the president nominating him (every nominee does that, of course) but having huddled in the Oval Office to strategize his confirmation.

Neither Lowry nor Stephens goes within a hundred miles of either of these fundamentally disqualifying points. Both of them know they have no answers to these weighty objections. So both of them, like every other Kavanaugh supporter, is hoping we won't remember them.

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't perform a real investigation of the sexual-assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh himself would benefit if the allegations can be disproved.

However, whether the allegations can be proved is irrelevant to his fitness to serve on the Court. He has already demonstrated that he is not fit.

His supporters are crossing their fingers that we in the body politic have lost sight of why.

Consigliere Mitch earns his keep

Mitch McConnell is steamrolling ahead with the Kavanaugh nomination.

Late Wednesday evening, McConnell filed cloture, an action that moves the Senate closer to a confirmation vote, though a final vote would not take place until Saturday at the earliest.

...

McConnell repeatedly vowed to hold a vote on the nomination this week and has said the results of the FBI investigation should not be a reason for delay, even as Senate Democrats have questioned the credibility of the investigation and called for more people to be interviewed as part of the probe.

"[T]he results of the FBI investigation should not be a reason for delay."

Really, Mitch? Even if the investigation turns up compelling evidence that Kavanaugh doesn't belong on the Supreme Court, or maybe even in the federal judgeship he currently holds?

Oh, right: Don Trumpone's White House, probably via Don "let's finish this, I gotta split" McGahn, never intended to let the FBI anywhere near anyone who could provide such evidence.

The fix is in. Consigliere Mitch has been completely consistent in signaling this from the beginning. And now, having indulged the three unruly children in his caucus (Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins) in their insistence on at least a token look at the serious allegations of sexual misconduct (including attempted rape) leveled against Kavanaugh, he is signaling that his patience is ended.

The very last obstacle to Kavanaugh's confirmation is his own performance at his session before the Judiciary Committee to rebut the attempted-rape allegations. Whether he committed the abhorrent acts thirty-plus years ago, he definitely displayed poor anger management, political bias and susceptibility to conspiracy theories. All of these things would cause us to doubt his fitness for an ordinary judgeship such as he currently holds, much less a Supreme Court seat.

McConnell and McGahn know this. That's why Republican talking points, including Don Trumpone's, all concentrate exclusively on the lack of evidence that Kavanaugh committed attempted rape. Not one single Republican will touch Kavanaugh's embarrassing performance of just last week. They'd like you to forget it ever happened.

The problem is that his performance during those hearings is just as relevant, if not far more relevant, than the allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford. (Sorry, Dr. Ford. For what it's worth, your credibility is infinitely greater than your attackers'.) That performance shows what Kavanaugh is like right now. And he's anything but judge-like, even by his own standards: see tonight's Rachel Maddow show for an exquisite piece on that score.

But his unfitness to be a judge, much less a Justice, is irrelevant to that old white patriarch McConnell and his old white male cronies. It is, in fact, offensive to them for Kavanaugh to be held accountable for his past actions. They're scared silly that if it happens to him, it might happen to them. As it probably should.

So Consigliere Mitch, seeing the goal of cementing a reactionary, far-right majority on the Court for decades in sight, is damning the torpedoes. And he may even take comfort in his nakedly unethical exercise of power because according to one poll this farce of a confirmation is firing up Republican voters to participate in the midterms. That could be disastrous not just for Democrats but for the country.

If Consigliere Mitch can shepherd Don Trumpone's boy Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court, he will be able to smile that creepy, disingenuous smile of his in the mirror, knowing that even though his Don has been totally useless as a conventional president, he, the consigliere, made everything work for his precious Republicans.

If you hate Don Trumpone and Consigliere Mitch as much as I do, you have one responsibility: vote Democratic in the midterms. No matter the obstacles.

The exercise of brute power

Matt Thompson in The Atlantic boiled down Kavanaugh's testimony to the Senate in these simple and precisely accurate terms:

Let us fully dispense with the polite fiction that last week’s Senate hearings on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh were intended to bring us closer to a common understanding of the truth. This entire affair is not about truth, but power—who will wield it, and at whose expense.

Judith Donath, also in The Atlantic, is more scathing:

What is hard to see, unless you see the world through the lens of a certain type of powerful man—like Trump, like McConnell—is that the picture that has emerged about Kavanaugh’s past, far from marking him as unfit, signals that he is trustworthy. It shows that Kavanaugh is there for the guys. Most of all, he knows how the world works: Ordinary rules are for ordinary people. They do not apply to the entitled elite—and he will fight to keep it that way.

Donath notes that not only has Kavanaugh demonstrated a willingness and ability to keep the secrets of his own elite circles — his Georgetown Prep male classmates, for instance — but a willingness and ability to uncover the secrets of others, such as Bill Clinton's. "Keep the secrets of the in-group; raid and reveal those of the out-group", as Donath puts it, adding, "Kavanaugh, up for an ostensibly non-partisan position, has hinted that Trump is part of his in-group these days".

The public doesn't currently know if Kavanaugh will be confirmed. My guess is that Don Trumpone and his senatorial consigliere, Mitch "fuck fairness, I'll do what I damned well please" McConnell, have put the fix in: no matter what the FBI investigation turns up, McConnell has the leverage to secure every Senate Republican's vote to confirm.

But however things turn out, those of us who aren't in the old boys' club have got to make our long-term goal the dismantling of that club, one old boy at a time. White men have got to have their stranglehold over this country's leadership broken.

Don Trumpone and Consigliere Mitch would be good first starts.

White man derangement syndrome

After hearing a clearly traumatized woman make credible accusations of attempted rape against a Supreme Court nominee, a white man who very likely will help eliminate a woman's right to have an abortion, Senator Lindsey Graham launched into an uncontrolled tirade against the injustice of the accusations. He seemed to inspire the nominee himself to engage in his own uncontrolled tirade of self-pity, decrying the public humiliation he has suffered and the death threats made against him and his family.

Lacking in either man's outburst was any hint he had processed even a tiny part of the trauma suffered by the woman who was attacked, trauma which included not just having to relive the incident before many skeptical senators and a nationwide TV audience, but both public humiliation and death threats that forced her and her family to go into seclusion prior to the hearing.

These two white men — one a United States senator, the other a federal judge under consideration for a Supreme Court seat — could only find room for indignation about the white male nominee's suffering. They could only lament their own powerlessness against the enormous "injustice" being done to them.

I call it White Man Derangement Syndrome.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox calls it "white male backlash". As Beauchamp puts it:

“I will not shut up” is a perfect mantra for Trumpian backlash politics. There is no risk that white men are, en masse, going to be silenced: They occupy the commanding heights of power in every walk of American life. The demands that they be quiet at times are a response to the overrepresentation of their voices, that they understand what life is like for more vulnerable people and then change the way they act accordingly.

But Graham is not willing to give even that little ground.

Sen. Graham shamed both himself and the Senate. Let this be his political epitaph.

Any lingering inclination to give Judge Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt vanished after his petulant whining and unabashed evasion of awkward questions. Whether he can be proven Christine Blasey Ford's attacker, he has proven beyond any doubt that he lacks the self-control, sense of responsibility and moral sense that a Supreme Court Justice must have.

Both of these white men demonstrated with stunning clarity the unhinged paranoia and blinding self-pity lurking at the heart of modern conservatism.

No reason to rush on Kavanaugh

Senate Republicans, I've heard, are suspicious that their Democratic colleagues are trying to delay filling Anthony Kennedy's seat until after the midterm elections.

What if Democrats are?

So what?

Mitch McConnell held open Antonin Scalia's seat for over 400 days. Although that record-setting vacancy was totally unnecessary, the country didn't grind to a halt.

The precedent has been set. Supreme Court seats can be held open while nominees for those seats are properly vetted (or, as in Merrick Garland's case, aren't given any consideration at all).

So you know what? Republican senators, shut the fuck up.

You have no reasonable grounds on which to object to a delay in Kavanaugh's confirmation. None.

And heaven knows, the mounting allegations against Kavanaugh make Republicans' refusal (specifically, Don Trumpone's White House's refusal) to permit an FBI investigation absolutely indefensible.

Kavanaugh behaved like a pig as a young man. Many young men do, to be sure. But the only ones who should make it onto the bench, and certainly the only ones who should be given a Supreme Court seat, are the ones who own up to their youthful misdeeds.

Kavanaugh has done exactly the opposite. He has demonstrated absolutely no remorse, or even any recognition that he did anything wrong.

If you Republicans think ramming Kavanaugh onto the bench won't start hundreds of thousands of motivated lawyers researching impeachment of Supreme Court Justices, you will discover your error very soon.

Mitch, you're going to hell

That would be Senate Majority Leader, world-class hypocrite and first-class asshole, Mitch McConnell, who said:

“How that happens really depends on our Democratic friends, how many of them are willing to oppose cloture on a partisan basis to kill a Supreme Court nominee — never happened before in history, the whole history of the country.”

"That" would be a vote on whether to end debate over the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. By longstanding Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to end debate. Republicans can only provide 52 of those votes.

I'm not wild about Judge Gorsuch's philosophy and attitude toward many issues, but I have no objection to him as a nominee. He's not insane, which at this point is refreshing for someone nominated by Trump.

The problem surrounding Gorsuch's nomination has nothing to do with him. Rather, it has everything to do with the unethical and outright despicable stonewalling by Senate Republicans in 2016. After Antonin Scalia's death in February 2016, Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, flatly refused even to give President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing. They had the gall to claim that eleven months was "too near" to the end of Obama's term for him to be able to appoint another Justice.

Bullshit, ladies and gentlemen. Bullshit. That's what you tried to make us swallow. And you didn't care that we knew it was bullshit, because you also knew that in the end, the country — the people who rely on you to do your fucking jobs, whether or not we voted for you — had no legal recourse.

World's greatest deliberative body, my ass!

Every single Republican Senator who didn't spit in Mitch McConnell's eye and call him out as the despicable opportunist he is, deserves the same opprobrium he does.

McConnell himself deserves debilitating, humiliating, long-term and terminal sickness for sacrificing the people's business on the altar of his political gamesmanship. He saw his duty, and denied it, and had the gall to protest that that wasn't what he was doing. Not only is he nakedly and witlessly partisan, he's a liar and coward, to boot.

Now he has the gall to chide Democrats for considering action that has never before been taken? After he presided over the first flat refusal of the Senate to do its goddamned duty of advising and consenting to the President's nominees?

At one time, country came before party. Not any more. And we can thank Mitch McConnell for that debasement.

Fuck you, Mitch. You are a despicable, small-souled man and have disgraced the legislative body you lead.

The Court and contraception, again

I warned about The Little Sisters of the Poor's objection to the Affordable Care Act's contraception-coverage provision a couple of years ago. Dahlia Lithwick's excellent Slate piece went into the deep philosophical issue at the heart of the nuns' objection to the provision: namely, that the nuns believe even signing the exemption paperwork the ACA requires of an objecting group would make them complicit in the provision of contraception. In a different post about Kim Davis' objections to Kentucky's same-sex marriage I explained the deep trouble that such an argument signifies:

Davis objects to standard legislative accommodations of objecting religious believers. She won't allow her deputies to do the physical work of issuing documents because they still require her signature, and even if the signature were imprinted by a machine it would, in her eyes, still reflect her endorsement of a sinful act. This level of belief can't be satisfied by legalistic fig leaves that exempt the believer from physically participating in the act: it considers standing aside and letting the action take place to be tantamount to complicity.

...

If you sincerely believe that the least little contact makes you complicit in a sin, I don't see how you can be virtuous in the modern world. I also don't see how you can believe in freedom of belief for anyone else if you're inclined to constrain what other people can do if their actions impinge on your "web" of possible complicity.

In a lament of the idiocy that was the Court's Hobby Lobby decision, I wrote:

How does it impermissibly burden Hobby Lobby's founder to pay an insurance premium for a policy that covers, but does not require, contraception? He's already paying his employees straight salaries that — gasp! — they might use to buy contraceptives at the drugstore. How do these situations differ from the founder's perspective?

• In both cases, it's the employee's choice to purchase the contraception. Nobody is holding a gun to Hobby Lobby's founder's head to buy it.
• In both cases, the employer is simply paying the employee; the only difference is the form of the compensation.
• Since when has it been acceptable for your boss to dictate how you spend your pay? You are not an indentured servant and the boss is not a plantation owner.

Why are the boss's qualms more important than my legal rights? Hell, why are the boss's qualms more important than mine? Answer me that, O Justices in the majority.

They can't. This case should never have been accepted for adjudication by the High Court.

The same objections hold in the Little Sisters case. I'm afraid that the same prejudices will hold among the blinkered conservatives on the Court.

The Little Sisters' case finally made it to the Supreme Court and, according to The Atlantic's Garrett Epps, the conservative justices were typically hostile to contraception and sympathetic to the religious group.

Roberts, Kennedy, and Alito seemed utterly oblivious to the other side of the question. If the plan “belongs” to the employer (Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that it does not, by law), then the benefits surely “belong” to the employee. By definition, she has earned her lawful wages, which include government-required employee benefits.

The decision of how to use those benefits—of whether and when to conceive—is a profoundly personal one that involves sensitive issues of health as well as ethical issues that are hers, and not the employers’, to decide. ... Solicitor General Donald Verrilli tried to bring that question to the fore. What the challengers were asking, he said, was that “those rights or those employees who may not share [the] petitioners’ beliefs be extinguished.”

Alito wasn’t interested in employees or their consciences, however. Did Verrilli not understand that this provision offended the important, the traditional, the conservative American religious groups?

Not for the first time, I curse the sanctimonious twit Samuel Alito. But his conservative colleagues on the bench were just as sexist and revolting. As Epps concluded:

The conservatives’ hostility to government, and to government-regulated health care, formed a toxic smog when it combined with what seemed, to use a term I don’t use lightly, like good old-fashioned boys’-club sexism. Women and their concerns, the conservatives seem to think, should not intrude into serious areas like medicine and health.

The blind fealty to the supremacy of religion among the conservative Justices is sickening. It's also harmful in the extreme to pluralism, genuine religious tolerance, and even public health in this country.

If there's a genie out there who can grant me wishes, could you please bless Justices Roberts, Alito, Kennedy and Thomas each with a vagina? Then they might gain a dim understanding of the depth of their abysmal idiocy on women's health.

In the meantime, each of those gentlemen can make use of his existing genitals to fornicate himself.

Yes, Obama can nominate Scalia's successor

It's a bit unseemly to be fighting like hyenas before Antonin Scalia's body is even cold, but such a fight is exactly what the majority leader of our supposedly august and wise legislative house, the Senate, has started:

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, said in a statement. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Ted Cruz, that inveterate opportunist, also chimed in, as did Chuck Grassley, though at least Grassley didn't try to pretend his partisanship was high-minded:

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, agreed [with McConnell], citing “the huge divide in the country and the fact that this president, above all others, has made no bones about his goal to use the courts to circumvent Congress and push through his own agenda.”

Yeah, and you and your fellow Republicans can hold up any number of statesmanlike figures who would never dream of making it their goal to use the courts just that way, Senator. But like I said, at least you didn't pretend to be more virtuous than you are.

On the other hand, Sen. McConnell, what's this about the people "should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice"? Guess what? We did. We elected Mr. Obama — twice. The people spoke loud and clear, Senator: you just didn't like the message. Obama still has eleven months as President, and he's damned well entitled to send up a nominee for confirmation. Get over it.

Now, the political reality is, Senate Republicans can and almost certainly will block any nominee until at least the next President takes office (if not later), so as a practical matter, Obama will almost certainly not be able to replace Scalia. However, this pretense of high-mindedness by McConnell and Cruz (via Twitter: "We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement.") is a bad joke. You shot your high horses long ago, gents, so get off them.

President Obama will send up a nominee because he's legally entitled to do so. We know Republicans will derail the nomination. But can they at least stop putting on ludicrous airs in the process?

The religious right's attitude problem

Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. Cue the freakout.

Justice Samuel Alito's dissent is as good a sampling of the opposition's reaction as any:

Today’s decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage. The decision will also have other important consequences.

It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. E.g., ante, at 11–13. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.

About using the decision "to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy", I can only snort derisively. No matter how the Court ruled, I would feel the same way toward opponents of same-sex marriage. Were I inclined to vilify them (and I like to think I'm not, but to tell the truth I'm not sure), nothing the Court could have said would have kept me from feeling that way. (Nothing the majority claimed in the Citizens United and Hobby Lobby decisions has changed my mind about their fundamental wrongness.)

As much as Justice Alito might like to think the Court's imprimatur matters to public opinion, it really doesn't. Not much. By the time the Justices start considering a case, everybody who cares has made up her mind. Certainly that's true for this issue.

To the question of "vilification" and the specter of "[stamping] out every vestige of dissent", I must again snort derisively.

First: you have the right to say and to believe same-sex marriage is wrong. You don't have the right to be popular. You don't have the right to escape criticism. "Vilification" of private citizens by other private citizens is a necessary risk in a society that prizes free expression. So, Justice Alito, even if the Court's decision directly prompted that kind of vilification (which, again, it won't), tough luck.

Second: the phrase "stamp out every vestige of dissent" is deliberately inflammatory. It conjures the image of Nazis ruthlessly crushing those who opposed Hitler, of resistance to authoritarian regimes everywhere and throughout history.

That's not the situation that obtains in the U.S., nor is it likely to obtain unless the nation crumbles entirely.

Alito and likeminded souls seem to imagine that federal stormtroopers will come for opponents of same-sex marriage, but those (nonexistent) stormtroopers won't come. No, the coercion of same-sex marriage foes will come from the daily interactions with millions of their fellow citizens who disagree with them and who tell them so firmly, and, I hope, respectfully. They will feel not the hands of federal marshals, but the weight of society's disavowal of their views. Alito probably doesn't like such coercion any better than the idea of federal stormtroopers, but he can't stop it.

Finally, opposition to same-sex marriage in all likelihood will never be stamped out.

You can't legislate attitudes out of existence. You can't change people's core beliefs with a court decision. And if the struggle for equal rights in the last century has taught us anything, it's that some people will never accept that certain others are worthy of respect. A small percentage of people disapprove of interracial marriage even today; Dylann Roof is but one of many who have an irrational hatred of blacks; sexism, explicit and implicit, still haunts us in spite of all the progress women have made over a hundred years.

In light of all that, is it reasonable to expect that opposition to same-sex marriage will be stamped out in our lifetime? Of course not.

Is it reasonable for people to try to bring the opponents of same-sex marriage around? Well, yes, court decision or no. And that persuasive process would have gone on even if the Court had ruled same-sex marriage was not mandated by the Constitution and its amendments.

Alito doesn't want himself or his ilk to be subjected to societal pressure, a curious attitude to have considering that the devoutly religious (who form the majority of the opposition to same-sex marriage) are perfectly happy to exert pressure on others in service of their religions.

To that I say, again, tough luck.

Get over it.