The claim that the US Supreme Court is not a dangerous cabal is simply ridiculous.
What kind of cabal is it?
“A cabal of medium to moderate riskiness”?
The only appropriate descriptor for this cabal is “dangerous,” or perhaps “overwhelmingly harmful and destructive.”
AP:
Justice Samuel Alito pushed back Thursday against criticism, including some from colleagues, that recent Supreme Court actions in major cases have been done hastily and in the shadows. “A dangerous cabal” improperly deciding important matters — hardly, he said.
Alito, in remarks at the University of Notre Dame, took aim at critics of three recent decisions in which the court’s conservatives prevailed over dissents by liberals.
In rapid succession beginning in late August, the court reinstated a Trump-era immigration program, allowed evictions that had been paused by the coronavirus pandemic to resume and let a Texas law severely limiting abortion go into effect.
All three cases came to the court as emergency motions, and were decided quickly and without the court’s more typical full briefing and oral argument. That process has been called the court’s “ shadow docket.”
“Our decisions in these three emergency matters have been criticized by those who think we should have decided them the other way, and I have no trouble with fair criticism of the substance of those decisions,” Alito said.
He added: “My complaint concerns all the media and political talk about our sinister shadow docket. The truth of the matter is that there was nothing new or shadowy about the procedures we followed in those cases — it’s hard to see how we could handle most emergency matters any differently.”
Alito noted that it’s not up to the court but to the parties in cases when they bring emergency motions. He said the recent criticism has suggested that “a dangerous cabal is deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view, without waiting for the lower courts to consider the issues.”
Alito said that “picture is very sinister and threatening, but it is also very misleading.”
What is sinister and threatening is the American federal court system. Coincidentally, it is also often misleading, such as when it claims it is not a “dangerous cabal.”
Judges were never intended to play the role of deciding the law. It’s a cliche to say that, of course, but it is nonetheless absolutely true.
At this point, the federal courts do nothing but “legislate from the bench.” Apparently, conservatives believed that this would be good once “conservative” judges were in charge. Needless to say, that did not work out as planned.
Tyrannical governments are never a good thing. People who say that a tyranny is good as long as they agree with it are either childlike morons, or they are people who just worship authority and power, and will do anything any tyranny tells them to do (in the latter case, “if I agree with it” is irrelevant, because these people believe authority itself defines what is moral and good).