Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented unequivocally. Photo / Getty Images
Notice: I have been thinking a lot about justice lately—the concept and the term. I thought the nine members of the United States Supreme Court were my only countrymen who bore the title of
“justice.” But it seems that with the unsurprising exception of Texas, whose 2022 Republican Party platform included a call for a referendum on secession from the United States, the top jurists on state appellate courts and the state Supreme Court are also called “justices.” Those who preside over lower courts are called “justices.”
This distinction seems to have devastating consequences. Our highest courts, and especially the Supreme Court, are supposed to be our last line of defense against all forms of tyranny and mob rule.
But lately, the six conservative members of that body have joined together to issue decisions that fly in the face of the Court’s very purpose, which is: “As the final arbiter of the law, the Court is charged with securing to the American people the promise of equal justice under the law and, in so doing, also functions as the guardian and interpreter of the Constitution.” During this term, the members have eroded that promise.
For example, all six justices voted to strike down the federal ban on bump stocks, attachments that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire up to 800 rounds per minute, a rate comparable to that of still-illegal machine guns. Bump stocks were used in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, the 2017 Las Vegas concert massacre, in which the shooter fired more than 1,000 rounds, killing 60 people and wounding 413. The justices twisted the terminology as “sole function of a trigger” for their own twisted political agenda. Allowing individuals to kill at an exponentially higher rate doesn’t strike me as “equal justice.”
The same 6-3 majority held that banning homeless encampments on public property did not constitute “cruel and unusual” punishment because homeless people were being punished for behaviors such as sleeping in public parks and the like, which can be criminal, as opposed to being homeless, which would be protected by the law. Once again, the justices pressed the language used to give cities the power to solve their homeless problem by evicting them.
In the now infamous Chevron case, the Supreme Court overturned its own 40-year-old decision and transferred immense power from federal agency experts (nuclear engineers, climate scientists, food and drug safety specialists, etc.) to their fellow judges. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority that “judicial deference to agency decisions is incompatible with the courts’ fundamental duty to interpret the law,” though he omitted the phrase “even if the court knows nothing about the subject matter.” Chevron was a huge victory for corporate profits, but equal justice ended up being undermined once again.
And in the most glamorous case of their 2024 term, the six sycophants ruled that former President Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for “official duties,” which his lawyers say include pressuring state officials to change election results, submitting fraudulent voter registrations, and pressuring his vice president to overturn a national election. And while the majority once again eviscerated equal justice by parsing the language, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was decidedly unambiguous: “The president is now a king above the law.” The name of the case was painfully clear—Trump v. the United States—and she lost big.
We live in very dangerous times, made all the more dangerous by the fact that those who have been designated to be our last bastions of rational, emotionless, apolitical thought and decision-making seem determined to pervert the very Constitution they were created to protect. This Supreme Court is playing games with the lives and liberty of hundreds of millions of Americans, and sadly, equal justice is not even on the agenda.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington DC..