The Supreme Court is gearing up to release a huge batch of high-profile, high-stakes decisions — and they're doing it in the worst way possible, a court watcher wrote Monday for Slate.
This comes after far-right Justice Samuel Alito, who has refused to step back from multiple cases where he may have a conflict, was caught on tape by an undercover reporter making incendiary political remarks about having to coexist with the left in America.
"The Supreme Court is about to drown us in a deluge of explosive and massively consequential decisions involving some of the most controversial issues of the day," Mark Joseph Stern wrote for Slate. "Right now, the justices are scrambling to complete blockbusters involving abortion, guns, homelessness, unions, social media, online disinformation, pollution, the administrative state—and, oh yes, hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions, including Donald Trump’s."
The problem with this "chaotic finale," he wrote, is that "this approach to judging — to ruling, really, in the monarchical sense — is both disgraceful and unnecessary. It’s disgraceful because regular people cannot possibly absorb the enormous amount of material that is poised to gush out of the court, as the justices surely know, much of it dressed up in legalese to obscure its meaning for nonlawyers. The overwhelming majority of Americans will have no hope of keeping up with the sweeping and complex decisions to come, even if those decisions have direct and negative impacts on their lives. And this inundation is unnecessary because the justices pick their own arbitrary deadline, then fail to manage the docket in a way that allows them to meet that deadline without cutting corners and overwhelming the news cycle with a glut of last-minute bombshells."
This deadline has already had damaging effects, noted Stern — dramatically shrinking the window and prospects for special counsel Jack Smith to prosecute Trump before the November election, for example.
"As we await the coming torrent of toxic opinions, we should bear this fact in mind: The pile-up of blockbusters did not happen by accident," concluded Stern. "It is the direct result of a cynical approach to the docket that front-loads the right-wing bloc’s priorities. The court’s composition could change at any time; some conservative justices surely remember when Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly, denying them a fifth vote in pending cases. And so they flood the zone, never putting off until tomorrow what they could do today. We are about to see the grisly consequences of these tactics. And we will be forced to live with them for long after that."