Dicta:
Dicta are judicial opinions expressed by the judges on points that do not necessarily arise in the case. [The ‘Lectric Law Library]
Noted in “GOP-appointed justices make combating climate crisis much harder,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:
In biting dicta, [Associated Justice] Kagan poked her conservative colleagues for their casual indifference to their purported principles. “Some years ago, I remarked that ‘[w]e’re all textualists now.’ It seems I was wrong,” she wrote. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it.”
See here for my commentary on how SCOTUS has achieved this depressing low in public opinion.
All I can add is that the conservative justices themselves have demonstrated the solution for the mistakes they’re making: overturning these problematic rulings. The raw political power being practiced here by the conservative wing of the Court has a number of shortcomings in a democracy, while persuasive arguments do not suffer permanently from its inherent problems like raw political power.
And apparently the extremist conservatives failed in persuasion, and so are moving on to the flawed raw political power phase of their failing political movement.
