Opinion

The Supreme Court’s Insufferable Weathervane

Scott Greer Contributor
Font Size:

Poor John Roberts: He just can’t catch a break from conservatives.

After voting to uphold Obamacare for the second time during his tenure last week, Roberts caught a lot of flak from the right. The chief justice even caught hell from the right on his bench, with Antonin Scalia opining that Roberts had made the health care initiative “SCOTUScare.”

Oddly enough, all this rage at Roberts for Obamacare has seemingly distracted conservatives from the supposed “swing vote” on the court — Anthony Kennedy. In addition to joining Roberts in saving Obamacare, the supposedly conservative Kennedy authored two decisions — on same-sex marriage and housing discrimination claims respectively — that imposed the will of elite opinion on the rest of the country.

Maybe Roberts is getting the hate because he was sold as a true-blue conservative. But Kennedy was also sold that way when he was placed on the court in 1988 after the nomination of arch-conservative Robert Bork failed to pass the Senate in 1987. The Reagan appointee looked poised to bring judicial restraint and a respect for liberty when he was confirmed.

However, for most of his career Kennedy has failed to do as promised, and he proved last week that he’s the worst Supreme Court justice on the bench right now.

Yes, the worst.

The out-and-out liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are not nearly as bad as Kennedy simply because they make decisions based on their own principles.

On the other hand, Kennedy appears to be making decisions based more on the supposed popular consensus — which happens to now align with the liberal jurisprudence of Ginsburg and Breyer.

Not only that, but the legal weathervane tries to look like an intellectual heavyweight when his latest opinions are gooey, feel-good nonsense draped in the dour decor of legalese.

Simply put, Kennedy has abandoned any pretense of principle in favor of etching his name on the so-called right side of history.

Take his opinion on the case that legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. Kennedy argued that marriage is a “fundamental right” and, thus, he said it is necessary to grant an undefined “dignity” to gay individuals seeking the arrangement.

This argument used quotes from Confucius, Cicero and Tocqueville for reference, but it mainly relied on unbridled emotional sentiment for justifying itself. The opinion suitably reached its apex in the concluding paragraph.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

Scalia righteously mocked Kennedy’s opinion as a decline from “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” Scalia also hit Kennedy for contradicting the dignity-loving justice’s own 2013 opinion that marriage is an issue best left to the states.

Clarence Thomas refuted Kennedy’s idea of dignity and said that government is incapable of bestowing that quality to citizens.

Chief Justice Roberts warned that Kennedy’s reliance on the doctrine of “fundamental rights” was eerily similar to the justifications the Supreme Court of the early 20th century used to gut labor protections.

Even ardent same-sex marriage supporters have criticized Kennedy’s argument. They believed the potential gay rights icon should have relied more on the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to overturn gay marriage bans instead of the doctrine of fundamental rights. The liberal argument here is that marriage amendments directly target a “vulnerable minority” for no compelling reason.

Interestingly enough, though, another Kennedy decision from last week upheld a broad interpretation of a law that’s supposedly designed to protect vulnerable minorities from discrimination — the Fair Housing Act.

The judge who longs for a National Mall statue issued another feel-good opinion that reaffirmed the theory of disparate impact — an idea that discrimination can occur even when there’s no evidence of bias.

In the swinging justice’s opinion, the Fair Housing Act “must play an important part in avoiding the … grim prophecy that ‘[o]ur nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal’… The Court acknowledges the Fair Housing Act’s continuing role in moving the nation toward a more integrated society.”

Justice Samuel Alito warned that this decision would not have such a rosy impact. In Alito’s opinion, it would result in “unfortunate consequences for local government, private enterprise, and those living in poverty” by potentially “interpreting disparate-impact liability to be so expansive as to inject racial considerations into every housing decision.”

In a separate dissent, Justice Thomas criticized the majority opinion for buying into the “the unstated — and unsubstantiated — assumption that, in the absence of discrimination, an institution’s racial makeup would mirror that of society.”

Furthermore, as Alito hinted at, the bill could have devastating economic consequences and significantly lower the quality of such necessary services as fire departments.

But that appears to be no concern for the justice who once preached judicial restraint.

The worst part about Kennedy is not his decisions, but the way he reached them. His argument seem to follow wherever the wind is blowing — even if it means overriding his own stated opinions in the process.

Many in America like to think that polarized politics are a huge problem. But a bigger problem lies not with ideologues making policy, but unprincipled hacks like Kennedy setting the agenda. Those bereft of principles rely on what’s popular to make decisions — which is a terrible standard to go by. Popular approval can change in the blink of the eye and usually relies on emotion rather than reason for its conclusions.

The Supreme Court was intended to resist the impulse of popular emotions in order to pass sober judgments. Today, thanks in large part to Anthony Kennedy, the Court has embraced this impulse and become the vehicle for implementing elite opinion onto Middle America.

It’s unquestionable that the Court has been infected with the virus of judicial activism. But the blame for this infection has less to do with the liberal justices conforming to expectation. They’re not the problem. The blame belongs to the supposed moral compass who has transformed himself into the best tool for implementing this agenda.

Follow Scott on Twitter

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel