I found the implicit and, in my mind, false assumptions of this statement to be revealing, if not surprising:
Two Republican-appointed members of the court, including Trump’s first pick, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., have made clear that their opinions will not always be predictable when it comes to issues important to Republicans. They each joined with liberal justices to defeat Trump administration priorities this week.
The court has also refused to take up cases for the next term that had been championed by conservatives, including cases on gun rights and California’s sanctuary cities law.
These twists have deeply frustrated conservatives. “The left and the right are playing to a different set of rules,” said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative religious group, after the Gorsuch ruling on Monday. “They seem to be able to appoint people who largely if not universally hew to the party line. On the right it feels sometimes that at best you are batting .500 sometimes.” [WaPo]
As if the justices are just hand puppets? Reed is a long-time veteran of the cultural wars, which means that his prism is all about politics and how to win them. You put enough conservatives on SCOTUS, and you should win all the important cultural cases: that’s how his mind works.
But that’s not how SCOTUS should work, and while I wonder sometimes about Justices Alito and Thomas, I think, given how many unanimous decisions we also see, that the Justices, in the main, try to do the jobs for which they’ve been hired.
Given all that, then, I think where Reed sees treachery and is perplexed that the Democrat-nominated Justices are so much more united than the Republcan-favored Justices, perhaps it’s simply this: the proper decision in these cases that leave him at a loss are those of the liberal wing, and the conservative wing defectors recognize that and vote that way.
Ideally, the Justices are not wind up dolls, but experts in the law who often deal with the hardest, most subtle cases, and deliver honest answers consonant with Constitution and law. That should be what they strive for. If Reed cannot figure this out, he should go get a janitor’s job and stop pretending to be a leader. Yeah, every time he gets my attention over the last thirty years, it’s never been favorable. He’s just another power-hungry bomb thrower, inflaming the mob to his own benefit.
Crabby, I am.
