Leftist iconoclasts want SCOTUS to be a priesthood, so they can overturn it

Stop treating them like priests of a state-sponsored religion.

Lauren Windsor cornered Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife at an invitation-only dinner held by the Supreme Court Historical Society. She was posing (as in “faking”) as a devout Catholic, and peppered the couple with all kinds of leading buzz phrases. She recorded it all, secretly. She was trying to topple the priesthood of the Supreme Court, and replace the priest with someone more to her religious liking. The one problem with her plan: Supreme Court Justices are not priests.

Image: The Supreme Court of the United States

About Lauren Windsor: she’s a leftist political agitator. She specializes in agitprop and dirty tricks. In 2021, she hired five guys to act as “white supremacists” and pose them as friends of then-candidate for governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin. She did this five days before the election. Windsor regularly posts on leftist sites like The Nation and DailyKos. She appears on Rachel Maddow’s television show. She’s one of the “go to” crowd for these media outlets, like James O'Keefe is for similar far-right organizations.

Windsor threw out platitudes to Alito: “People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that — to return our country to a place of godliness.” Alito, courteously, responded, “I agree with you. I agree with you.” Now the definition of “fighting” may be lost in translation. Christians believe that most of the fighting for a place of godliness occurs on your knees, in prayer, and in relation to other Christians. That’s how the Bible teaches it. But leftist agitprop specialists see it as improper influence of their priesthood, which, in their minds, cannot invoke God (unless it’s to mock).

The usual media response resulted here. That Alito is an “extremist” and his wife is a problem. That Alito “questions political compromise” (as the AP put it) in the recording (which he didn’t know was being made, and was led as cattle by misleading statements).

“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito said. “There can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

As always, there’s a reference to the Court being “shrouded in secrecy” as if it’s a priesthood, a secret society. Nothing is further from the truth.

The Supreme Court is a Constitutional organ of the state—of the U.S. government. It is the only element of the Judicial Branch that is specifically named in the Constitution. Therefore, by the Constitution, it must be independent, and isolated, from the rest of the political structure. That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court can’t be political. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that political matters can’t end up before the Court, and the Court’s Justices have to be monks.

The Justices are lawyers, legal scholars, doing a very important job. It’s a job for life, if they want it. (Justice David Souter did retire, remember?) But they are not held to the standard of priests. They have a (now published) Code of Conduct. It calls for impartiality, and the avoidance of impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE. A Justice should not allow family, social, political, financial, or other relationships to influence official conduct or judgment. A Justice should neither knowingly lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance the private interests of the Justice or others nor knowingly convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the Justice. A Justice should not testify voluntarily as a character witness.

Note that it doesn’t say the Justices can’t have family, social, political, financial or other relationships. Justices are free to have political associations. They are not free to be activists for those political associations. They are not free to allow those associations to leverage their “special position” of influence. However, they are free to hold opinions on politics, religion, finance, or any other topic that normal people consider to be personal. As long as those opinions don’t affect their impartiality in dealing with the law.

But of course, opinions are what they’re paid to give. Legal opinions, well-reasoned and supported by history, case law, and rational argument. These opinions differ depending on the Justices—opinions—on various topics dealing with the law, and with life in general. These are not priests who hold to a religious doctrine of the law or the way the U.S. should be run. But having a religious doctrine, or friends in politics, is not prohibited.

Under “Responsibilities,” the Code of Conduct declares “A Justice should not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism.” Would you say that being secretly recorded at a private function related to the Court itself, then savaged by the media for saying fairly anodyne things that are interpreted as “extreme” (because they were meant to come off that way by the agitprop leftist soliciting them) constitutes “partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism”?

I say it does. Therefore, the correct response to it, as Alito has done, is to resist it and denounce it. It seems that since the makeup of the Court’s Justices has changed since 2017, the parlor game of bullying the Court—by President Biden (which is totally inappropriate of a POTUS), by the media, and by leftist agitprop dirty tricks specialists, has become more popular.

The Court should be “secretive” in the sense that it’s insulated; the discussions among Justices is not to be leaked out (as Alito’s draft shamefully was in the Dobbs case). Few sitting Justices have been so put upon as Justice Samuel Alito—even Justice Clarence Thomas hasn’t had to endure this kind of lowdown dirty political garbage. Normally that ends at confirmation (ask Justice Brett Kavanaugh, or the one who was never seated, the late Robert Bork, of whom the phrase “borked” was born by none other than Joe Biden). Now the political dirty tricks keep coming.

These modern iconoclasts like Lauren Windsor want to make the Supreme Court into their own priesthood, and they feel free to use whatever unethical and filthy political tricks they want to overturn the priests.

The Justices are not priests. They are lawyers and scholars. They need to be free from political dirty tricks, independent, insulated, and able to self-police. That’s not how things are working right now, and it’s one of the worst examples of how our government is dysfunctional at the hands of vicious extremists on both sides of the political spectrum.