Over the next few weeks, look for commentators to provide analysis of recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court in three distinct categories: 1) this is bad, 2) we don’t know how bad this is yet, and 3) this is not as bad as it could have been.
At this point in my career, I am bored with most commentary that fits into categories #1 and #2. I appreciate #3 in the way that one might appreciate a newborn baby with tentacles and multiple heads. Its sentiment is somehow both true and untrue all at once, and the optimism that drives it is so sickly sweet, so naïve, so freakish, that one doesn’t know how to feel about it, but I think it’s my favorite of the three. There must be optimism, just as there must be babies, hideously deformed or not.
The take I intend to present here is not quite so buoyant, but I do wish to add another layer to whatever silver lining might be perceived around the Court’s latest term. Faced with the justices’ flagrant corruption and open assault on reason itself, the American liberal, a creature which has been engaged in a 60-year-long game of chicken with their own unwavering faith in the essential goodness of the high court as an institution, must reckon with some fundamental truths. I shall now reveal these truths, which have hitherto been known only by select members of the academy, the two percent of lawyers who work on…
