Opinion: I‘ve been thinking a lot about justice lately – the concept and the term. I thought that the nine members of the US Supreme Court were my only countrymates who carried the title of “justice”. But it seems that with the unsurprising exception of Texas, whose Republican Party’s 2022 platform featured a call for a referendum to secede from the US, top appeals and state Supreme Court jurists are also called “justices”. Those who preside over lower courts are called “judges”.
This seems a distinction with a currently devastating difference. Our highest courts, especially the Supreme Court, are designed to be our last line of defence against all manner of tyranny and mob rule.
Of late, however, the six conservative members of this body have combined to hand down decisions that run wildly counter to the court’s own raison d’être which is: “As the final arbiter of the law, the court is charged with ensuring the American people the promise of equal justice under law and, thereby, also functions as guardian and interpreter of the constitution.” This term, members vaporised that promise.
For example, all six voted to overturn a federal ban on bump stocks, attachments that enable semi-automatic rifles to fire up to 800 rounds per minute, a rate comparable to still-illegal machine guns. Bump stocks were used in the deadliest shooting in US history, the Las Vegas concert massacre in 2017, in which the gunman fired more than 1000 rounds, killing 60 and wounding 413. The justices twisted terminology like “single function of a trigger” to their own twisted political agenda. Allowing individuals to kill at an exponentially higher rate doesn’t seem much like “equal justice” to me.
The same 6-3 majority held that banning homeless encampments on public property does not constitute “cruel and unusual” punishment, because homeless people were being punished for conduct, like sleeping in public parks and such, which can be criminal, as opposed to the status of being homeless, which would be protected under law. Once more, justices wrestled language to the ground to empower cities to solve their homeless problem by clearing them out.
In the now-infamous Chevron case, the court overturned its own 40-year-old decision and shifted immense power from issue experts in federal agencies – think nuclear engineers, climate scientists, food and drug-safety specialists and more – to their fellow judges. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the recurring 6-3 majority that, “Judicial deference to agency rulemaking was incompatible with the courts’ fundamental duty to interpret the law,” though he left out the “even if the court doesn’t know jackshit about the relevant subject matter”. Chevron was a huge win for corporate profits, but equal justice ended up under the bus once more.
And in the most glamorous case of their 2024 term, the sycophantic six ruled that former president Donald Trump was immune from prosecution for “official duties”, which his lawyers argue include strong-arming state officials to alter election results, submitting fraudulent slates of electors, and pressuring his vice president to overturn a national election. And while the majority once more disembowelled equal justice by parsing language, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was decidedly unambiguous: “The president is now a king above the law.” The case’s name was painfully clear – Trump v United States – and the latter lost big.
It feels like a very dangerous time, one made more dangerous when those appointed to be our last bastions of rational, unemotional and apolitical thought and decision-making seem hellbent on perverting the very constitution they were created to protect. This Supreme Court is playing word games with the lives and freedoms of hundreds of millions of Americans, and sadly, equal justice is not even on the board.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington DC.
