The legendary baseball player and manager Ted Williams once wrote a letter to the Angels outfielder Jay Johnstone on improving his hitting. Among his pieces of advice was that“with two strikes, you simply have to protect the plate.”
Williams’s advice on not striking out came to mind this week when another leak of confidential information rocked the Supreme Court. (The prior leak of theDobbsdecision went unsolved).
For Chief Justice John Roberts, the message is clear: it is a time like this when you have to protect the plate.
Roberts, of course, is famous for his own baseball analogies. In his confirmation, he declared that “judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them…Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”
Yet, justices do make rules not only in new precedent, but in the operation of the court system. Those rules are being broken.
In the same week as the new leak, Justice SoniaSotomayorattacked her colleagueBrett Kavanaugh as essentially an out-of-touch prig who had never even met an hourly wage worker.
It was an unfair insult and a departure from the Court’s long-standing rules of civility.
Additionally, a forthcoming book by Mollie Hemingway on Justice Samuel Alito contains anembarrassing account of how Justice Elena Kagan allegedly screamed at Justice Stephen Breyer so loudly before theDobbsopinion that the “wall was shaking.”
(The book suggests that Kagan was upset with Breyer agreeing to spur along the dissents to get out the final opinions in light of rising threats against conservative colleagues after the leak).
For an institution that prides itself on its confidentiality and insularity, the Court is looking increasingly porous and partisan in these leaks.
Source: ZeroHedge News
