Conservative Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett complained this week that the American public doesn’t trust the high court and had the gall to blame the media instead of themselves.
Barrett openly complained during remarks at the University of Louisville on Sunday that the Supreme Court is increasingly seen as partisan and that she thinks it should be seen as nonpartisan instead because Americans don’t see what she considers a healthy deliberative process to reach decisions.
Thomas, meanwhile, spoke on Thursday at the 2021 Tocqueville Lecture at the University of Notre Dame, where he blamed the media for the Supreme Court’s negative image.
“I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said. “So if they think you are anti-abortion or something personally, they think that’s the way you always will come out. They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician.”
“That’s a problem,” Thomas continued. “You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions. The court was thought to be the least dangerous branch and we may have become the most dangerous. And I think that’s problematic.”
It is laughable that Thomas claims the anti-abortion wing of the high court, which includes himself, Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, won’t “always” rule against abortion rights. Because that’s exactly what he has done throughout his entire tenure on the bench. All five recently gave the green light to a draconian Texas law that virtually bans all abortions in the state and turns anti-abortion fanatics into bounty hunters.
The fact is that these five unelected judges, three of whom probably should not even be on the court because of the dubious way they got there, have made it clear that precedent and the Constitution do not matter to them. They have a right-wing agenda that includes being anti-choice and anti-democracy. They only have themselves to blame for not being trusted by the American people, who increasingly see the court as a puppet show that rules in favor of big business and the Republican Party. They don’t engage in healthy deliberations. Their minds are already made up before they even hear the case. It’s no secret that conservatives have aimed for decades to gut abortion rights by trying to stack the court with right-wing judges.
This Supreme Court has made bad decision after bad decision, and they are doing so based on their own political beliefs. Not the law. Not the Constitution. Not precedent. Americans are suffering because of their rulings. That’s why Americans no longer have faith in the institution.
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