The Rightwing Supreme Court Justices’ Fair-Weather "State Sovereignty” Canard

Two days ago, Dan posted an entry by run75441 titled “SCOTUS Chastises Congress and the Executive Branch.”  The post’s title wasn’t quite accurate; run’s post was about Chief Justice John Roberts’ annual state-of-the-judicial-branch report, in which he was writing in his capacity as administrative head of that branch, not in his actual judicial capacity, and not for the other justices.

Run (who didn’t title the post; Dan did) deeply criticized Roberts for bragging about the austerity of the federal courts in recent years, including his own court, which, he also bragged, had decided on 64 cases in its last term.  That was down from, I think, 70 the term before, and the main reason for that reduction was that the ACA case consumed a full week of oral-argument slots– the full week at issue normally consisting of arguments in six–count ‘em, six!–cases; some full weeks consist of four arguments, leaving the justices slightly less exhausted than they are after the six-argument work weeks.

Roberts implied–he did not say so, expressly, but he did imply–that Congress and the White House take a cue from the justices and force the federal government to make do with less money.  To which I suggest that the justices really lead by example, and get rid of their four-justices-apiece law clerks, who do most of their work for them and start doing their legally-mandated jobs themselves.  After all, the federal government at least doesn’t pay salaries to congressional lobbyists–the equivalent of Supreme Court law clerks.

Anyway, I posted a comment to run’s post, and then asked Dan to add it as an update to run’s post, which he did.  My comment said:

The Supreme Court is rarely in session.  It’s seasonal, part-time work.  They usually hear argument in 10 cases a month, seven months a year.  In December, they didn’t hear even that many.
There’s really sooo much that can, and should, be said about the issue of (virtually universal lack of) access to the Supreme Court, and its repercussions.  Roberts’ bizarre, cutesy annual report is … oh … I don’t know …characteristically hubristic?

Run responded to my comment, and I then responded to his, writing:

What’s especially outrageous is the type of situation you’re talking about [a federal habeas corpus case challenging the constitutionality of aspects of the proceedings in a state-court criminal case]: The Supreme Court almost never agrees to hear cases on “direct appeal” (a legal term of art) from state supreme courts, in criminal or civil cases, with the major exception that they do often agree to do so in criminal cases when it is the state (i.e., the prosecution) that is asking them to hear hear the case in order to overrule a (rare) state supreme court ruling in favor of the criminal defendant. In state-court criminal cases, when it is the defendant who is asking the Supreme Court to hear the case in order to overturn a conviction, on constitutional grounds, the Supreme Court seems to figure that the criminal defendant can file a habeas corpus petition in a lower federal court.
Which they can, but the Supreme court has made that right an all-but-empty one–just a shell game, really–by interpreting a 1996 “jurisdictional” statute in a way that bars the lower federal courts from throwing out the state-court conviction on constitutional grounds in almost every case. With each passing Supreme Court term, the right to federal habeas review becomes even narrower, a seeming impossibility until it happens. In the last two years, the Supreme Court has treated that right as all but nonexistent. So the almost-total lack of access to the Supreme Court on direct appeal by state-court criminal defendants effectively removes access to constitutional review in federal court.
This is even truer in civil cases [including some that involve incredibly important, truly fundamental rights of the sort protected under international human rights laws, although they have nothing at all to do with, say, prison inmates; really–trust me on this], thanks to a set of perverse, gimmicky Supreme Court-created “jurisdictional” doctrines, which the Supreme Court has stood by and watched metastasize to remove any access to federal court in order to make a constitutional challenge, except for ExxonMobil, which asked the Supreme Court to limit the doctrine at issue, which the Court did, so narrowly as to apply in almost no other case, especially since the other, related doctrine actually bars access in the circumstance in which ExxonMobil was allowed to have it. (Sort of like Bush v. Gore.)
Anthony Kennedy, the leader of this state-courts-have-sovereignty-and-dignity! juggernaut, likes to say this is done in the name of liberty. (Isn’t everything the rightwing wants done in the name of liberty?!) Which reminds me of a political science class I once took on Maoism. [Maoism] included, basically, the routine use of Orwellian language, in which everything is the opposite of what its name or description indicates.
Of course, the current Supreme Court’s goal–the goal of the legal right since the early 1980s–is to turn the law into nothing but circuitous yellow-brick-road procedure: a dead-end labyrinth whose very purpose is its circuitry and fruitlessness. They’ve come incredibly close to succeeding.

There’s a whole lot more about this that can, and should, be said, and I plan to write in more depth about it.  Which will make me the only one writing for public consumption about it; the general news media covers only “substantive” legal issues (“substantive” being another legal term of art; legal issues are either “substantive” or “procedural.”)  And rarely covers even substantive issues that aren’t part of the culture wars debate.  Which is really nice for the legal right, because their justices and judges can, and do, do just about anything they want, completely under the radar.

But for now, I’ll just add that the judicial right, lead on this by Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, conflate state sovereignty with freedom, but, at least regarding those two and their wingy three colleagues and some (but not all of their lower-court compadres), do so only with respect (pun most definitely intended) to state courts.  To them, state legislative- and executive-branch actions (e.g., state statutes) are fair game for constitutional challenges, and they harbor no inhibition whatsoever about impinging upon state “sovereignty” in recognizing the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause when striking down as unconstitutional state statutes that the political right doesn’t care much for; Texas’s colleague-admissions affirmative action law, say.  (Sit tight for the upcoming oral argument there in that case.)  And their summary reversal of the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling late last year upholding the constitutionality of Montana’s longstanding campaign-finance statute is another example that comes (very) quickly to mind.  My mind, anyway.

To be fair to Kennedy, and certainly to his credit, he–and he alone, among the Fab Five–does extend this principle to state statutes that liberals don’t like.  Texas’s criminal anti-sodomy statute is one example, but there are other important ones as well.

But, in what appears to me to be nothing more than just old-fashioned professional courtesy, Kennedy effectively exempts state judicial branches from Supremacy Clause mandates to honor constitutional rights of individuals.  And state courts violate individual procedural and substantive rights, in criminal cases and in certain types of civil cases, with absolute abandon, comfortable in the knowledge that they can.  The result, far, far more often than not, is the very antithesis of freedom.  Except in the Matter Hatter-esque language that the legal right has found so useful.

So, next time Kennedy or Thomas writes an opinion singing the praises of state sovereignty–by which they almost always just mean state-court sovereignty–as advancing “freedom,” ask them (rhetorically, of course; they won’t actually hear you unless you retain Paul Clement to speak to them for you, which was basically run75441’s point) whether they think that, say, German Jews in the mid- and late 1930s were freer because Germany was a sovereign state.

I will, anyway.  Or maybe I’ll just ask the Mad Hatter. Orwell lives. These days, though, in this country it’s called “federalism.”

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Occasionally, one of my AB posts goes viral (relatively speaking), racking up a couple thousand views on statcounter.  This is one that I hope does.  Actually, I hope it gets a million hits.

Yeah. A million hits would be good.

Is there such a thing as hitting the Supreme Court in effigy?