The Supremes, the Song and Dance Group That Passes Judgement on Our Laws

Of course, there was the American girl group and premier act of Motown Records during the 1960s. Florence Ballard, Diana Ross, and Mary Wilson were indeed supreme, and I recommend them to you on YouTube.

But its my pet name for those nine justices (or at least six of them) who sit in a fine building in Washington and sing songs that are way out of tune for today’s society. Yeah man, John Roberts and the Supremes. They are charged by the Constitution of the United States of America to pass judgment on various laws that are passed up to them by our lesser courts.

French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville noted the unique position of the Supreme Court in the history of nations and of jurisprudence. "The representative system of government has been adopted in several states of Europe," he remarked, "but I am unaware that any nation of the globe has hitherto organized a judicial power in the same manner as the Americans. A more imposing judicial power was never constituted by any people."

That was then (1835) and this is now, nearly 200 years later

De Tocqueville might not be so generous today, but then it seems the world at large has become less generous of our tattered republic with each decade over the last half-century or so. The Court deserves an outsized portion of that decline, appearing to feel that waterboarding of non-combatant political prisoners at Guantanamo is just fine, but the voting rights of Black American citizens are not all that important.

You’ll accuse me of cherry-picking…perhaps you are correct

But each of us evaluates our government by conveniently picking the cherries on our personal trees, which is why we have elections. Throw the bastards out is such an American expression and it serves us reasonably well as we swerve our national way through periods of liberal and then conservative positions. The Court has never satisfied all of us, liberal or conservative, but it at least garnered our respect over most of the 234 years of its existence.

That respect is now gone

Americans' ratings of the Supreme Court are now as negative as, and more politically polarized, than at any point in more than three decades of polling. Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say the Supreme Court has too much power, almost three times the share who said this in August 2020. The only crutch holding up the institution is Republicans, who dearly love anti-abortion and anti-minority rulings. Should Republican support disappear over the horizon, the Court will be in real trouble. Chief Justice Roberts knows this but has effectively lost control over his conservative majority.

So they sing and dance their way past the horrors of Justice Thomas’s ethical shipwrecks, but Washington is not Motown and no new choreography and arrangements will save the day.

We Americans have an almost endless appetite for bullshit

But the world outside is somewhat more critical and, no matter the waves of migrants at our borders, our reputation as the land of the free and the brave only enjoys a narrowing home-field advantage. Across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America, we are no longer the strong nation depended upon to protect the poor and defenseless from bullies.

Not entirely because of our decline, right-wing parties and downright dictatorships are on the rise to a shocking and worrisome degree where freedoms and economic progress seemed to be on the rise. But just as in a well-tended garden, freedom needs watering.

And, at the moment, America seems dry as a bone…