'That doesn’t seem like law': Supreme Court justices going public with grievances after contentious session

According to a report from CNN's Ariane de Vogue, Supreme Court justices have not gone quietly into their off-time before returning to work in October and are increasingly going public and pointing fingers at each other after concluding a highly contentious session that overturned Roe v Wade and shoved aside decades-old restrictions on guns.

As the report notes, traditionally justices hit the speech circuit and don't directly address details of rulings but major disagreements about how rulings are being reached are being exposed to the public.

Case in point: Justice Elana Kagan questioned the future of the court in a speech in Montana last week that was remarkably critical as well as candid.

“If over time, the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that is a dangerous thing for a democracy,” Kagan claimed. "I think people are rightly suspicious if one justice leaves the court or dies and another justice takes his or her place and all of a sudden the law changes. It’s like: What’s going on here? That doesn’t seem like law.”

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“We have a court that does important things and if that connection is lost – that’s a dangerous thing for the democratic system as a whole,” she continued. "The way the court retains its legitimacy and fosters public confidence is by acting like a court.”

CNN's deVogue wrote, "In those opinions and in public comments, members on both sides of the ideological divide are expressing reservations not about their ability to interact civilly – but about the court itself and its future," adding, "All the while, the public doesn’t like what it sees. According to a new Marquette Law School poll, 61% of the public disapproves of how the court is handling its job. And 63% oppose the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, according to a CNN poll released Thursday."

In a speech on Thursday, Justice Amy Coney Barrett told an audience, "It’s like a marriage, we have life tenure so we get along and that means you are not going to rupture relationships with people that you are going to be spending your careers."

You can read more at this link.