Joe Biden did us a favor at SCOTUS...

...by appointing a Justice with all the vision and persuasive power he has.

If there were any remaining doubt about the difference in press coverage between conservative Supreme Court justices and liberal ones, it was dispelled by a NYT article by Adam Liptak, who actually is one of the more clear-headed Times writers. The occasion was the Times’ reporting about the Court’s decision involving the propriety of nationwide injunctions against the administration, injunctions issued by a single trial judge here and a single trial judge there. These have become frequent, as Leftist forum-shopping plaintiffs have sought effectively to overturn last November’s election that preferred, e.g., less Deep State regulation and more expedited deportations, by getting unelected US district judges to enjoin numerous of Trump’s executive orders. (If you believed all that breast-beating you heard after the 2020 vote about the critical importance of “respecting the results of the election,” hahaha, joke’s on you).

It came to a head, or came to a head most recently, in the case in which a six-justice majority sharply limited the power of district court judges to block presidential orders. In a case with that degree of importance for the division of power among the branches, one would ordinarily expect the Chief Justice to be the author. In what is to my way of thinking an important and revealing departure from this practice, the Chief gave the writing job to Justice Barrett. She wrote in language that was enthusiastically greeted by Trump fans (some of whom had spent prior weeks involved in thoughtless, unworthy and partisan criticism of her).

Justice Brown-Jackson, Joe Biden’s sole appointee (thank you God), let ‘er rip in a scorching dissent. The liberal establishment, led as usual by the Times, was quick to join the cheering section. As Mr. Liptak begins his coverage:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote just five majority opinions in the Supreme Court term that ended last month, the fewest of any member of the court.

Left unsaid is that it was the fewest because Jackson is ideologically the most extreme.

But her voice resonated nonetheless, in an unusually large number of concurring and dissenting opinions, more than 20 in all.

Consider how that sentence would have been written if the dissent were by Justice Thomas or Justice Alito: “But the shrill voice of the ethically questionable far right nonetheless made itself heard…”

Several of them warned that the court was taking lawless shortcuts, placing a judicial thumb on the scale in favor of President Trump and putting American democracy in peril.

Got that? Democracy is imperiled when the democratically elected President does what he told the electorate he would do, and can only be rescued by the wisdom of an unelected jurist appointed by the just-repudiated administration.

She called the majority’s opinion in the blockbuster case involving birthright citizenship, issued on the final day of the term, “an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Let’s pause here for a moment. Trump’s enemies lost to him eight months ago. It wasn’t a landslide but it wasn’t that close either by modern standards. They have called for his impeachment and removal, but they know it’s not going to happen. He appears to be in good health. The criminal cases against him sputtered out one way or another.

So what means are left to save America’s defining virtue — the democratically enshrined rule of law, a gift to human governance that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have died to preserve.

Let’s just say it out loud. What’s left is the Ryan Routh method. And when Trump’s opponents go on and on month after month with desperate, sulfuric, screed-ridden condemnation about how he threatens to wreck the very pillars of our heritage, what “remedy,” exactly, do you think they’re talking about?

Murdering Trump has been tried twice within the last year; the first time came within an inch of succeeding. My money is on the likelihood that, what with the daily torrent of hate towards him for being “an existential threat,” it’s going to be tried at least once more. When it is, his frenetic critics will turn on a dime and, with red-faced indignation, insist that they are shocked and saddened. Some of it will be sincere. A lot of it will be PR only.

This is not to say that Justice Jackson wants to see Trump shot. I can’t and don’t believe any such thing. But it is to say that she has a responsibility as a citizen, and yet more as a Justice of the Supreme Court, to recognize what’s going on around her and exercise the maturity and restraint formerly taken for granted in persons of her station — restraint that mere commentators like me should never have to call for.

Is that what she was doing in her dissent? See for yourself. As the fawning Times continues:

Justice Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, quickly emerged as a forceful critic of her conservative colleagues and, lately, their approach to the Trump agenda.

Her opinions, sometimes joined by no other justice, have…raised questions about her relationships with her fellow justices, including the other two members of its liberal wing.

Justice Sotomayor, a jurist approximately as far to the left as Jackson, conspicuously took a pass on signing her name to the “existential threat” business, as of course did Justice Kagan, a person of high character and judgment notwithstanding her liberal stance on most legal issues.

“She’s breaking the fourth wall, speaking beyond the court,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University. “She is alarmed at what the court is doing and is sounding that in a different register, one that is less concerned with the appearance of collegiality and more concerned with how the court appears to the public.”

Justice Jackson’s only duty under the Constitution is to resolve cases and controversies that come before her in litigation. Maybe sticking to that would, as the Left sniffingly says (when convenient), “lower the temperature.”

I would appear not to be the only person who noticed this.

[Justice Jackson’s rhetoric] prompted an extended response from Justice Barrett, the next most junior justice and the author of the majority opinion. It did not stint on condescension.

Perhaps a reader will be able to tell me what that last sentence is doing in an alleged news report.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion signed by all five of the other Republican appointees.

….including the Chief, who is well known for going out of his way to promote collegiality on the Court.

“The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain,” Justice Barrett went on, referring to Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”

Barrett concluded by “observing only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

In my view, that observation is the most important in the case because it captures the essence of the Left’s attempts to nullify the last election. They lost the White House, they lost the House and they lost the Senate. So, rather than (as they insisted so furiously four years ago) respecting the electorate’s verdict, off they run to every Lefty judge they can find in San Francisco, Manhattan, Baltimore, Boston, etc., etc. to run the country from their chambers.

Honoring democracy my foot.

I’ll conclude with only one more note. Justice Jackson’s climbing out on the Leftist limb with all its anger might be popular with the New York Times and that crowd, but, as I suggested in my title, it’s just as smart as the person who appointed her, Joe Biden. If the minority liberal contingent on SCOTUS has any genuine hope of winning over the next few years, it’s going to have to appeal to some of the more conservative members. I have my doubts that this gets done by shaming them, lecturing them, or accusing them of betraying the rule of law so they can suck up to Trump. If this weren’t obvious on its own, Justice Jackson might look to the example of an earlier liberal Justice who, as much as anyone in the late Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, shaped the Court to his own views.

That would be Justice William Brennan. Brennan was so effective, not merely because he enjoyed better numbers generally on his side than Justice Jackson, but because he was a superb internal politician on the Court. He was, so I’m advised by a person who would know, friendly and affable. He didn’t have a chip on his shoulder, and still less did he publicly and personally demean his colleagues.

That helped produce an awful Court, as I see the law, but that’s not the point. The point is that, in that setting as in so many others, snarling doesn’t work but telling a good joke does.

Thank you, Joe Biden, for using your one chance to make an appointment to install someone who, even at age 54, seems so oblivious to Justice Brennan’s lesson.