'Corrupt' Supreme Court is 'just making stuff up' to deliver wins for the right: Lawrence O'Donnell
The Supreme Court is not simply "corrupt" — it is actively fabricating facts and accepting lies in order to deliver culture war wins for the Republican Party, argued MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Wednesday.
"Based exclusively on the public record, it is undeniable that the current court, this Republican-dominated Roberts Court, is the most corrupt in history," said O'Donnell. "And they are corrupt on two fronts. One, extreme financial improprieties and obvious financial conflicts of interest with billionaire litigants, in which cases appear before the Supreme Court. But the much graver corruption in the Supreme Court, the corruption that affects the daily lives of all of us, is the corruption of Supreme Court scholarship."
"Is legal scholarship scholarship if you can just make up stuff?" continued O'Donnell. "That is the question that I have been privately asking myself for over a year now. And that is the essence of my crisis of faith. For I once faithfully believed that the Warren Court, followed by the Burger Court, were using the most refined techniques of legal scholarship to deliver to us the true meaning of the Constitution, I now believe the Republican justices on the Supreme Court are just making it up. And they are doing that in a way that scholars cannot possibly do in other areas of scholarship, like mathematics or biology."
As an example, O'Donnell said, "we have a Supreme Court whose final decision of the year was based on a person who was made up. A person who does not exist." Specifically, the 303 Creative v. Elenis ruling, which held in favor of a web designer who feared she would be "forced" to make wedding websites for same-sex couples, and allowed the justices to, in O'Donnell's words, "mark gays and lesbians for second-class status."
"The same-sex couple named in the lawsuit that reached the United States Supreme Court was proven not to exist," said O'Donnell. "That same-sex couple did not even exist. The lawsuit falsely claimed that a same-sex couple named Stewart and Mike wanted to have a website made for their upcoming wedding. The lawsuit included a phone number for the couple, which Melissa Grant called to discover that Stewart has been married to a woman for many years and has a daughter, and had no idea that his first name and phone number appeared in a case before the United States Supreme Court, and was used to deny other people their rights."
"But because the opinion had already been sent to the printer, there was nothing that the Roberts Court was going to do about the fraud perpetrated on the Supreme Court," added O'Donnell. "And if the court is just making stuff up, they obviously don't care about details like the people who are activating the case in front of them actually existing."
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