America must fix its broken Supreme Court

A retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has advice for Trial Lawyers. If the facts are on your side or says, pound the facts into the table, if the law is on your side, he continues to pound the law into the table. And if neither the facts nor the law is on your side, well then just pound the table. The Supreme Court is an institution that’s supposed to be above politics, but sadly, its current configuration. It’s totally immersed in it. The justices routinely decide cases on abortion First Amendment, affirmative action policing and even at the end of its most recent term, a case on the January 6 insurrection. The justices routinely decide all these cases by brushing aside the facts of the case and the law and pounding politics into the table. It’s not just at the six conservatives on the court, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett all lean to the right. It’s worse than that. They’ve quit leaning. Now they’ve toppled over. They don’t even pretend to be fair, neutral or impartial. They’re all in on the pursuit of their ideological agenda. My conservative friends either haven’t noticed or maybe they don’t care, maybe they approve it. My liberal friends, however, have definitely noticed. And they’re worried sick about how far this court will go in pursuit of the right wing justices political objectives. The spectacle reminds me of lucha libre, the weekly Mexican wrestling program I used to watch on Spanish language TV as a kid in 1970s. With my grandfather who was born in Chihuahua, there were heroes and villains and referees and black and white jerseys who tried to keep the peace and make sure the battles were fair. In one popular gimmick, a favorite wrestler would pretend to have gone to a training session and become a honorary referee. He’d had the black and white jersey and everything. And in the middle of the match, he’d interfere and help one of the combatants flattened the other as the crowd cheered and booed so much for neutrality. That’s the troubling dynamic at work now, on the Roberts Court. After all, what is the Supreme Court really, if not a band of referees tasked not just with deciding if laws, policies and practices are in line with the Constitution, but also with making sure that everything is on the level and that everyone gets a fair shake when they come before the bench? You know, like the inscription on the building says, equal justice under law. That phrase probably sounds foreign to the six member conservative majority on the current Supreme Court, I doubt they recognize it much less use it as a guiding principle. If they took the concept of equal justice more seriously, they might not find themselves embroiled in so much scandal. A lot of the courts troubles surrounds wealthy benefactors who appear to take care of those justices who protect their interests and matters that come before the court. Then there are the wives, both Jeanne Thomas and Martha Alito have gone full out political in ways that create conflicts of interest for their husbands. The whole thing is a terrible shame, as is what the court has become, due to the corrosive influence of special interests. There should be at least one branch of the federal government where ordinary Americans can go to seek redress or search for justice that is not affected or infected like politics. My fellow Americans, how in the world do we get here? What happened to our ideal of what the Supreme Court was supposed to stand for? And what it was supposed to do? Where did the rules and expectations go as to how justices were supposed to conduct themselves? Most importantly, how do we fix this broken institution and get back to where we used to be? That won’t be easy, but it needs to be done. The Republic depends on it.