The search for the leak on the upcoming Abortion decesion has screwed up the internal’s of the court as much as it has women who seem to stand to lose their abortion ‘Rights’….
Politics and Ego issues?
Revenge?
Oh, and somebidy just got arrested outside Justice Kavanaugh’s house who said he wanted kill a High Court justice….
At the Supreme Court, nothing is as usual this term after the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in the biggest abortion case in nearly a half-century.
Normally at this time of year, the justices would be exchanging hundreds of pages of draft opinions and working with each other to resolve differences and reach consensus in the most challenging cases of the term. Instead, the court is riven with distrust among the law clerks, staff and, most of all, the justices themselves.
The atmosphere behind the scenes is so ugly that, as one source put it, “the place sounds like it’s imploding.” To cite just one public example, Justice Clarence Thomas in a speech a few weeks ago seemed to say he no longer trusts his colleagues.
“When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally,” he told a conservative group. “You begin to look over your shoulder. It’s like kind of an infidelity that you can explain it but you can’t undo it.
Specifically, he implied that he doesn’t trust Chief Justice John Roberts.
“The court that was together 11 year[s] was a fabulous court. It was one you look forward to being a part of,” he said.
Those 11 years were when the chief justice was William Rehnquist, who died in 2005 and was succeeded by Roberts, who, ironically, had been one of Rehnquist’s clerks many years earlier.
The root of the current antipathy is not definitely known. What is known is that Roberts infuriated some of conservatives on the court 10 years ago when he changed his mind and voted to uphold key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. These switches are rare, but they do happen; justices change their minds, and in good faith. But that switch so angered some of the court’s conservatives that it leaked, obviously from someone connected to a conservative justice, who aimed to embarrass Roberts.
A much bigger leak — and problem
Now, there is a much bigger and, in fact, unprecedented leak to deal with — an actual draft opinion reversing a half-century of abortion precedents. The chief justice called the leak “a betrayal” and ordered the Supreme Court marshal to conduct an internal investigation. But the investigation may only be adding to problems at the court.
To begin with, the Supreme Court marshal overseeing the probe has no experience as an investigator; nor do the Supreme Court police. Their job is to protect the justices. And people who do have experience as investigators say that leak inquiries are, in the words of several, “nightmares.”…