A reporter put one legal expert's faith in the Supreme Court to the test during a recent interview.
Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, has been loudly defending the Supreme Court as "apolitical" following the controversial week it had. Last week, the court released opinions that rolled back consumer rights and dramatically expanded presidential power, both of which have raised alarm bells among some political analysts.
Honing said in a recent interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker that the Supreme Court isn't necessarily a "political" body, even though it has issued some policy-based opinions. The opinion last week barring the Trump administration from removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook without cause is one example, Honig said.
He added that "on a substantial number of very high-stakes cases, we saw two or more of those four Justices reaching results that go against their conservative ideology, that yield nonconservative, anti-Trump, pro-liberal outcomes."
That would suggest the court doesn't consider politics a first principle in its analysis, right?
Another comment that Honig made during the interview seemed to contradict that point. Honig said that at least one Justice has "gone out of his way to broker outcomes within the Court to wheel and deal" as a matter of protecting the institution of the Supreme Court.
"Aren’t you describing politics?" Chotiner asked.
Honig argued that there is a difference between "institutional politics and engineering policy-real-world outcomes."
"Institutional politics happens every day between and among all nine Justices," Honig said.