I think it makes perfect sense if you view the courts as largely a political operation, with a thin veneer of legal language on top.
Given the past decades of highly coordinated--and completely politically motivated--court-stacking, it's probably most accurate to put the political definitions ahead of the legal definitions of conservative.
This applies to every court in this country, and even more so to some. If 5th circuit is “corrupt, incoherent activism”, I’m lacking words to even describe the 9th.
No, the great majority of judges and courts – even the majority of e.g. Trump-appointed district-court judges – have internally consistent legal philosophies and prejudices which happen to differ from one to another. Sometimes judges talk past each-other or fundamentally disagree, but that is not the same as corruption. For the most part judges take their job seriously and do it carefully and in more or less good faith.
What we are talking about here is judges ignoring the constitution, the law, past precedent, the will of the people, and the facts of the case, in order to make up a logically incoherent "argument" that happens to promote the judges’ pre-decided zany partisan outcome. Such rulings are profoundly corrosive to the rule of law and the legitimacy of the court system.
> What we are talking about here is judges ignoring the constitution, the law, past precedent, the will of the people, and the facts of the case, in order to make up a logically incoherent "argument" that happens to promote the judges’ pre-decided zany partisan outcome. Such rulings are profoundly corrosive to the rule of law and the legitimacy of the court system.
Yes, and this in fact happens in every court, that's my entire point. I can provide endless examples of outcome-oriented rulings from every single appeals circuit, and from SCOTUS too.
In fact, the original Roe v Wade decision is the archetypical example of outcome oriented judiciary, of “judges ignoring the constitution, the law, past precedent, the will of the people, and the facts of the case, in order to make up a logically incoherent "argument" that happens to promote the judges’ pre-decided zany partisan outcome.”
First, nothing in constitution talks about abortion. Second, when Roe was passed, it forced states to allow actions that previously have been illegal in every single one, i.e. it ignored the law. Third, it ignored the precedent that saw limiting abortion as perfectly kosher. Fourth, it ignored the will of the people, who at the time were decidedly against abortion being allowed to the extent Roe requires (and in fact, they still are to this very day, if you ask them if abortions should be allowed in 6th month of pregnancy). Finally, the argument in Roe is completely incoherent as a matter of law, being based on the “emanations of the penumbra” of what is being said in the actual law.
I do think that abortion should be legally allowed, up until 15th week. Nevertheless, Roe is the clearest example of extremely bad judiciary.
> In fact, the original Roe v Wade decision is the archetypical example of ... “... zany partisan outcome.”
The Roe v. Wade decision was joined by 1 Roosevelt-appointed justice, 2 Eisenhower justices, 1 Johnson justice, and 3 Nixon justices, and opposed by 1 Nixon justice and 1 Kennedy justice.
Abortion was not a partisan issue until afterwards when a group of GOP activists decided it would help them politically to spin abortion into a moral panic they could organize around in churches (which, except for the Catholic church, had mostly been ambivalent before). This is hard to remember after 4+ decades of intense partisan propaganda about the subject from the GOP.
The Supreme Court was not really a partisan institution at the time, and justices regularly split in their decisions in every imaginable configuration. (After the ignominious end of the Nixon administration, a different group of GOP activists started a decades-long conspiracy to stack the court with corrupt partisans with no regard for the collapse in the court’s legitimacy and the rule of law. That plan has been highly successful, Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell’s great masterpiece.)
> First, nothing in constitution talks about abortion
Abortion is a question of fundamental body autonomy (Can my state use my body in order to preserve the life of another person[1][2]), and all the other rights enumerated in the constitution aren't worth a rat's ass without body autonomy.
[1] It pretty immediately follows that if the state has the power to do so, it should also have the power to take you apart for your organs, because I will die without an organ transplant.
[2] Or, as the case may be, another person-to-maybe-be.
Maybe, but here is the thing: that’s not the argument actually put forward in Roe v. Wade. This thread is not about litigating whether there is a constitutional right to abortion. Instead, it’s whether the particular case, Roe v. Wade, was correctly decided as a matter of law. If you want to argue that it was, you need to refer to the actual arguments put forward in it, instead of some (arguably) better arguments they could have used instead.
All court activism is corruption; their job is not to make law or have political opinions of any sort, they should be slaves to the text of the law, not bending it to their will.
Yeah, certainly not what we once thought of as conservative judicial restraint.
One comment I remember reading on Twitter which makes sense: "Funny how what the 1st Amendment means seems to align perfectly with currently fashionable conservative (MAGA) social views."
>The term “conservative” means nothing if you apply it to a court which has overturned years of legal norm across various areas of law.
your definition of conservative seems to be "obeys Newton's second law", or going further, "synonymous with hysteresis": "resists change, but thereupon resists changing back"?
Yes, the correct term is reactionary, which many modern "conservatives" are - they don't want things to remain the same, they want a return to "the good old days".
