Washington Post heralds new SCOTUS term by touting liberal justices bashing its ‘rightward turn'

Washington Post reporter Robert Barnes' article on the U.S. Supreme Court’s new term focused on the "historic lows" the institution has supposedly fallen to since its "rightward turn."

The report mentioned how pundits, politicians, and even Supreme Court Justices themselves are "worried" for the legitimacy of the court since it overturned Roe v. Wade with it Dobbs decision, as well as ruled in favor of other conservative issues.

Barnes' Thursday piece, titled, "Supreme Court, dogged by questions of legitimacy, is ready to resume," claimed, "The court’s 6-to-3 conservative majority quickly moved its jurisprudence sharply to the right, and there is no reason to believe the direction or pace is likely to change."

He added, "If it is the conservative legal establishment’s dream, it has come at a cost," and pushed the notion that the court has become less popular.

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"Polls show public approval of the court plummeted to historic lows — with a record number of respondents saying the court is too conservative — after the right wing of the court overturned Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of a constitutional right to abortion."

It’s not just public opinion. The reporter noted that the more liberal justices are worried about "what the court’s rightward turn has meant for its institutional integrity." As he said, Chief Justice Roberts "defends his conservative colleagues," but Justice Elena Kagan "increasingly is sounding an alarm about the next precedents that could fall and the implications for public perception of the bench."

According to the report, the public and the liberal justices are worried about the conservative-majority court weighing in on upcoming cases, which include a case on "whether universities can use race in a limited way when making admission decisions," "Two major cases involve voting rights," and a case considering "whether laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation must give way to business owners who do not want to provide wedding services to same-sex couples."

Barnes added that "the court will hear a challenge regarding the Clean Water Act."

He then opined, "Liberal justices sound worried."

Providing evidence of this, he quoted Kagan’s words to an audience at Salve Regina, a Catholic university in Rhode Island, last week. She said, "The court shouldn’t be wandering around just inserting itself into every hot-button issue in America, and especially it shouldn’t be doing that in a way that reflects one ideology or one set of political views over another."

He also added another of her quotes ripping her conservative colleagues: "It just doesn’t look like law when some new judges appointed by a new president come in and start just tossing out the old stuff."

Barnes also included a quote from former Justice Stephen Breyer during a recent CNN interview, torching the last Supreme Court term he was part of as "very frustrating." He provided a warning to conservative justices, saying, "You start writing too rigidly . . . the world will come around and bite you in the back."

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Barnes quoted Supreme Court Institute at the Georgetown Law Center executive director Irv Gornstein, who blasted the Dobbs decision. He said, "For many others, it shattered their faith in the Supreme Court. Inside the court, Dobbs has provoked a deeply divisive debate on what it means for the court to act with legitimacy."

Biden’s slams on the court were also given a feature. According to Barnes, last week Biden trashed the court’s Dobbs decision to a group of Democratic activists, describing it as "the first one in our entire history that just didn’t fail to preserve a constitutional freedom, it actually took away a fundamental right."

Biden further stated, "Justice Alito said that women can decide the outcome of this election — paraphrasing some quote in the actual decision. Well, he ain’t seen nothing yet."

Gornstein added that the liberal justice’s dissent in that decision "said in no uncertain terms that that was a lawless decision, and that it was made only because five justices could make it so, and the only difference between prior law and this law is that there was a change in the composition of the court."

He then warned of "a potential for ill will carrying over into this term and into future terms."

Barnes also quoted New York University law professor Melissa Murray who claimed that there is a "’whole curio cabinet of weirdness’" about the court." Murray noted that her biggest frustration was how the three Trump-nominated judges "pledged varying degrees of allegiance to stare decisis at their confirmation hearings and then voted to overturn Roe at the first opportunity."  

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Though the author did acknowledge at the end of his report that those who work with the conservative justices, like Washington lawyer Erin Murphy, believe they are reaching their results because they believe they are "legally correct." She asked, "What if they just are reaching the result because they think it is legally correct? Just because someone appointed them in hopes they would do so, it’s political not law?"