The first Monday of October is upon us. This is the day the Supreme Court begins its new term. The justices have been on recess and away from the Capital since the end of June. But they have had a busy summer. We just don’t know much about what they were doing.
The Supreme Court is shrouded these days. Literally and figuratively.
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John Roberts is annoyed. I had picked a stronger word, but Merriam-Webster says my word is considered vulgar in both Britian and the United States, so I chickened out.
Please take note. When the Chief Justice of the United States is annoyed he clearly expects us all to pay heed. I spent all of three seconds taking heed. And then began laughing uncontrollably.
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Yes, he’s a liar. Yes, he’s a hypocrite. Let’s drive him out of office. Let’s forget that he brought us through the Covid crisis, stabilized the economy, passed laws designed to fund future growth and development, expanded healthcare and restored America’s standing among its allies. Let’s call him an old fool, a disgrace, and never vote for him again.
Wait a minute.
Excuse me if I don’t get on the bandwagon in the media and on both sides of the political divide in condemning President Joe Biden for pardoning his son Hunter. To steal a phrase (“Gone with the Wind”), frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
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In my two previous columns (here and here) I detailed some of the winners and losers resulting from the opinions issued during the Supreme Court term just ended. Now let us look at the biggest winner of them all, the Supreme Court itself. In the last three weeks of the term, the Supreme Court transferred much of regulatory and administrative authority and rulemaking to itself. The federal courts were not authorized and are not equipped to serve as roving regulators of last resort for hundreds of federal agencies. According to the Court:
Every summer professors at the nation’s law schools huddle to discuss what, if any, changes should be made to their teaching curriculum after the Supreme Court term just ended. This year, they are scrambling to deal with the train wreck for constitutional law that was the Court’s 2023-2024 term.
I am not a lawyer. But after fifty years as a journalist, I am spending my emeritus years in part teaching a course titled “Media Law and Ethics for Journalists” in the UCLA Extension program. This is a required course in the school’s journalism certificate program and is available online.
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The six members of the conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court cast their ballots for Donald Trump on the last day of the court term, then ran out of town to begin their standard three months’ long vacation.
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It has become a tradition for me to write a series of blogs at the end of the Supreme Court term reviewing the major cases decided during the court year. I’m still working on this project, but it is not ready yet. Give me a few more days to digest the opinions the conservative supermajority dumped on the nation in the last few weeks. I find myself nearly overwhelmed by their blatant attempt to rewrite the Constitution and change our lives in ways I view with disgust and disappointment. I find it difficult to concentrate.
At times like these I like to think of better moments in the history of our great nation. We celebrate tomorrow our Independence Day, noting the date, actually July 2, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress declared “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States….”
“The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epoch in the History of America,” Massachusetts delegate John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3. Adams, often prescient, vividly described the parades, “illuminations” and festivities he believed would be regular events, staged each year to note the occasion. We wound up celebrating the Fourth of July, the date of the signing of the final form of the declaration. But whatever the date the principal of the event was the delegates’ belief that a nation should rest not on the arbitrary rule of a single man and his hand-picked advisors, but on the rule of law.
Relax with your family. Celebrate your nation. Read something about our history. You can even watch the film of 1776, the Broadway musical based on that sizzling summer of 1776 in Philadelphia, when our nation was born. And reflect on what we are making of the legacy of the brave men who met and wrote the Declaration of Independence.
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