That was Chief Justice Roberts channeling his inner Milton Hirsch in Tyler v. Minnesota.
From the conclusion:
The Takings Clause “was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.” Armstrong, 364 U. S., at 49. A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed. The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more. Because we find that Tyler has plausibly alleged a taking under the Fifth Amendment, and she agrees that relief under “the Takings Clause would fully remedy [her] harm,” we need not decide whether she has also alleged an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment. Tr. of Oral Arg. 27. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is reversed.
Meantime, the NY Times has this message for the Supreme Court:
The Supreme Court will soon issue rulings, on affirmative action, student debt relief, and the First Amendment and gay rights, that have the potential to affect the American public for generations. And yet public approval of the court is at a historic low. This was true even before the seemingly endless stream of reports over the past few weeks about the justices’ lax ethics. Since a conservative supermajority took control of the court in 2020, it has blown through the guardrails courts are expected to observe — showing little respect for longstanding precedent, reaching out to decide bigger questions than it was asked to and relying on a secretive “shadow docket” to make hugely consequential rulings with no public explanation.
Even Republicans who are happy with the Supreme Court’s recent rulings are voicing their concerns. “What I would urge the court to do is take this moment to instill more public confidence,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on ethics at the Supreme Court on May 2. “I think we’d all be better off if they did that.”
Mr. Graham is right: The nine justices — unelected and employed for life — are shielded from the usual mechanisms of democratic accountability, and so they depend on a high level of public trust like no other institution of American government. Their failure to take the steps necessary to restore that trust, steps that are entirely within their control, is undermining their legitimacy as one of the country’s most vital institutions.
Instead the justices are behaving as though the same laws they interpret for everyone else don’t apply to them. They’re not entirely wrong. In most other government jobs, people can be fired for disregarding laws or ethical obligations, but the justices can be confident that they will face no consequences. Federal laws that explicitly apply to them — involving, for example, financial disclosures and recusal standards — are not enforced, leaving the justices to self-police, and the highest court is not bound by a code of ethics as the lower federal courts are.
5 comments:
What the NYT and Sen. Graham forget is that the Justices have those life tenures so that they are shielded from the whims of public opinion. This is not a glitch; it's a feature.
Maybe we don't like that feature. In which case, we should amend the Constitution. Until then, this is the system as it was designed.
Spare me the NY Times' crocodile tears. Their faux outrage is exactly that. Where was the haughty lecturing when gay marriage and gay sodomy laws were struck down? And ethics? These concerns are reserved strictly for conservative judges and their families. Sotomayer participated in a ruling where her publisher was a party. The Times' reaction? Crickets.
4:12: Equating Sotomayor’s conduct with Thomas’s is nonsense. She disclosed payments she received from a publisher for books she wrote. Thomas concealed significant sums and benefits he received from a wealthy benefactor he called a close friend.
Equating Sotomayor's behavior with Thomas's is nonsense. She disclosed payments she received from a publisher for books she had written. Thomas concealed substantial sums and benefits he had received from a wealthy patron whom he called a close friend.
But that patron never had a case before the court. We invent ethical transgressions to score partisan political points. Ruth Ginsburg particiapated in cases where her husband had an interest. None of these judges let it affect their rulings or vote. But the left uses them as a cudgel against Thomas, whom they tryly hate with a passion as he dispels thier decades old narrative of black people helpless without the assistance of the administrative apparatus to put them on a par with while America.
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