Courts have been, and will likely continue to be (at least until next year’s elections), the principal check on President Trump’s … casual … relationship with the law.
But (and largely because of that) they have also become high-level targets for the President and his supporters—both verbally and literally. With such an ongoing assault on judicial independence, now is the time for the justices to remind everyone why we have an independent judiciary—not as an end unto itself, but as a means of preventing tyrannies of the majority.
The way the courts do that is not just by checking the other institutions of government, but by doing so through a coherent (and publicly articulated) set of principles the neutral application of which ought to provide the very moral authority on which the Court’s power depends.
By doing nothing to push back against those attacks (indeed, by indirectly incentivizing them in some cases), and by behaving in a way that gives at least the appearance of justices more interested in rationalizing their votes than in reconciling their jurisprudence, the Supreme Court is ultimately weakening the entire institution of the federal judiciary at the worst possible moment.
The Court may think that all it’s doing is reining in lower courts. But I fear that that, too, is just a vibe.
