TheRobotLives wrote:
I don't think SCOTUS judges are scholars or great intellects.
The smart judges won't get on SCOTUS, because their decisions won't be liked by politicians.
So, we only get the hacks.
Five of them on the ACA (Obamacare) ruling decided that "absence of commerce is interstate commerce", so, sitting in your home, minding your own business is "interstate commerce".
Most everything is interstate commerce and needs to be regulated according to these hacks.
It's like looking at your dog, and wondering if your dog is a "originalist" or "contextualist"; it doesn't matter, because your dog is going to do some really stupid stuff.
We’ll take Gorsuch as an example. Columbia, Harvard, and then a DPhil from the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. You don’t get that without being very, very smart.
I think Gorsuch’s opinion on the recent gender discrimination case was truly exceptional. It was an argument I’d not seen made before, but it was watertight, and in hindsight should have been obvious.
Or let’s look at the liberal justices:
Elena Kagan: Harvard, Oxford, Princeton; excellent lawyer, Dean of Harvard Law School, senior civil servant
Stephen Breyer: Stanford, Oxford (Marshall Scholar), Harvard; military strategic intelligence; law professor at Harvard, author of prominent legal textbooks, 40 years as a federal judge
Sonia Sotomayor: raised by a single mother, summa cum laude from Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review, taught at Columbia, made a federal judge in her 30s by George HW Bush
No getting away from it - these people are sharp.
Liberals often pour scorn on Clarence Thomas so let’s do him too: Yale Law followed by a very successful career, particularly in the public sector. Sure he’s not as impressive as the others but Yale doesn’t take dummies. Most people couldn’t do what he does.
29 Sep 2020, 7:47 am
