Tag: Samuel Alito

A World Unsettled: The Supreme Court And The Risks Of Activism

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

January 1, 2024. Happy New Year! Just eleven months and five shopping days before Election 2024. Whether you find it comforting that 2024 also happens to contain an extra day might be the best marker of how Political Seasonal Affective Disorder has impacted you. Personally, I haven’t been sleeping particularly well.

The New Year is often about taking stock, and if I’m counting correctly, this is my 101st essay for 3 Quarks Daily. The majority have been about American history, American politics, and what is ostensibly American law but looks a lot like politics.

Last August, as the 49th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation drew near, I started a series about the chaos of the late 1960s/early 1970s and how Presidents can lose their hold on the White House. That led me back to two men, one famous, the second memorable, who, to this day, in different ways, have had an impact on the way I think.

I will come to Henry Kissinger shortly, but I first want to spend a little time celebrating Walter Kaufmann. This is not the prolific philosopher Walter A. Kaufmann who was a pre-World-War-II expat from Germany, got his PhD at Harvard, and spent most of his career at Princeton. My Walter Kaufmann is Walter H. Kaufmann, who was also a German expat, got his PhD at the New School for Social Research, and, in 1953, published Monarchism in the Weimar Republic. My Dr. Kaufmann liked a cigar, a good story, and a better glass of wine. He also taught at my high school—German to those less linguistically challenged than I was, AP European History to voluble (in English) types like me. Dr. Kaufmann had a certain cool about him, in no small part for having gone to grade school with Werner Klemperer, son of the conductor Otto Klemperer, and, to Dr. K’s enduring dismay, the future Colonel Klink.

Like all good little suburban students, we took AP classes to take AP exams to score high enough to get college credits. Dr. K was a realist, but wanted to teach this subject on his terms. The word went out that no one got higher than a 93, his logic being that no one could know anywhere near 100% of the subject matter. So, if you were in the running for Valedictorian or Salutatorian and/or cared very much about your final class rank, to learn at the feet of Dr. K came with some obvious risks. Read more »

Supreme Corruption: The Highest Extort in the Land

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. —Immanuel Kant

Justice Clarence Thomas

I have a couple of friends in my county who might be considered high-powered on the local level. One is a district judge and the other is a county commissioner. I’ve invited the judge to a few local gatherings that support relatively benign conservation groups. He has always declined, saying that he may at some point have to rule on one of their cases, so he doesn’t want any appearance of supporting the group outside of court. I recently invited the county commissioner to a benefit dinner for another conservation group. He accepted the invitation but insisted on paying his way through a donation to the organization as he didn’t want to accept any gift from me. Compared to some of the all-powerful Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who rule the land, their ethics are studied and consistent. On Chief Justice John Robert’s court, their ethics might be considered quaint and would find no home.

Thomas and Alito have both accepted extravagant paid vacations worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars by political operatives and businessmen who have a lot to gain from having Supreme Court decisions go their way. In Alito’s case, he joined hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer on his jet to Alaska for a fishing trip in 2008 and then failed to recuse himself on a 2014 Supreme Court decision that ensured Singer netted billions of dollars from a business deal. ProPublica, arguably the best investigative journalism operation in the world, wrote about the story in June. Anticipating the story when ProPublica sent him a list of questions about the Singer trip, Alito wrote a sort of preemptive editorial in the Wall Street Journal defending the trip—before the story was even written.

Part of Alito’s defense of flying on Singer’s jet to Alaska was that there was an empty seat that would have otherwise gone unused. That feeble excuse harkens back to the days of the notoriously corrupt New York Alderman, George Washington Plunkitt, who made the famous distinction between “honest graft” and “dishonest graft.” Serving in the New York City government in the late 19th century, Plunkitt knew in advance what lands would be necessary to complete a public park. So he bought the land and then sold it to the city at a very tidy profit. As he put it, “There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: ‘I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.’” Read more »

Your Rights: Roberts’ Rules Of Order

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

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. …[W]e do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country. —Chief Justice John Roberts, Opinion of the Court, Biden v. Nebraska

Let us not be misled.

Here we go again.  Another year, another round of controversial Supreme Court rulings, another set of difficult questions about the behavior of Supreme Court Justices.

This is not a happy group, and the unhappiness is not merely ideological. The personalities are different. In each of the four instances of changing seats since 2016, the Court lost a bit of its temperamental cohesiveness. Beyond the famous friendship between Justices Scalia and Ginsburg, Justice Kennedy was conciliatory and mindful of the Court’s traditions; Justice Breyer was courtly and insisted he was among friends. Now we have Justice Kagan squaring off against the Chief; Justices Thomas and Jackson engaging in what looks to be a very personal argument; and Justice Alito veering from searching for the Dobbs leaker, to accusing his critics of endangering his life, to airing his grievances from the safe space of the WSJ Opinion pages. Let me admit to being surprised that Justice Kavanaugh not only vouches for collegiality, but is also the Justice most in the majority.

That the liberal wing of the Court is discontented is understandable—with a couple of exceptions, it’s getting crushed on the field. Linda Greenhouse, in an article for The New York Times, points out that long-held conservative wishes that had been dammed up behind the pre-Trump-largely-centrist Court have been realized. Abortion, guns, affirmative action, the open embrace of religion, and a heavy SCOTUS hand on those regulatory actions of which conservatives don’t approve—all these trophy wins have been banked, with more to come. Greenhouse ends on what anyone who believes in checks and balances should find chilling: “The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize.” Read more »