View from K Street: Courting disaster

As the Supreme Court ends its current term, it doesn’t appear to recognize that it is in crisis. Once regarded by the public and other jurists as rigorous, respected, and above reproach, the Court has sunk to unprecedented levels of disfavor. And the Court has no one to blame but itself.

We cannot ignore that too many of the Justices began their life tenure with dissimulation under oath before Congress. We are shaken by the continuing breaches of ethics, of Justices appearing to be “on the take”—a response heightened by the Court’s secrecy, persistent failure to disclose, and its haughty refusal even to consider reform. Perhaps worst of all, for those sitting in a building emblazoned with “Equal Justice For All,” there’s a pervasive sense that the rulings of this Court are based more in political preference than in legal analysis. And you don’t have to be a legal scholar to understand that sense. This Court’s decisions have become scarily predictable. You don’t need to know much about the legal underpinnings of an issue. So long as you understand the politics, you have an odds-on chance of predicting the outcome. That is the road to disaster.