Assholes of the Month: The Supreme Court Conservative Justices

Usually, the damage a bad President does can be reversed once he’s gone, except for one crucial factor: The lifetime appointments made to the Supreme Court guarantee an active legacy outliving a President’s term(s) in office—by decades if the appointees live long enough.

We knew there was going be a shitstorm after Trump was elected in 2016 and managed to stack the Court with three conservatives in those four years of infamy: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. They joined Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts in a solid 6-3 right-wing majority determined to eviscerate every progressive ruling going back to the New Deal. The once venerable principle of stare decisis—the legal doctrine stating that courts follow previous precedents, principles, rules and standards when deciding subsequent cases with similar circumstances— is now dead in the water. And the Sinister Six is poised to continue turning back the clock 50 years if Trump slithers into the White House again.

Roe v. Wade, the law of the land for half a century, was the first domino to fall with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022. All of Trump’s three SCOTUS appointees were carefully vetted for their hostility to abortion rights, and they rewarded their sponsor by guaranteeing his campaign vow to kill Roe. In many red states a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions is now a thing of the past.

This obsession with sanctity of life doesn’t seem to extend beyond fetuses and embryos, however. Conversely, the Gang of Six is giddy about greasing the wheels of capital punishment, routinely rejecting last-resort appeals of inmates facing execution. When you consider that a staggering 575 convicts have been exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989 (National Registry of Exonerations), the Supreme Court should be more open to such life-or-death appeals, not less. After all, the death penalty is irreversible.