Mollie Hemingway
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I think the Dobbs decision combined with what the liberal justices were saying both before and after that.
So it is true that justices strongly fight with each other in their opinions and dissents.
They'll
make fun of each other.
Justice Scalia was really good at this.
He once accused Clarence Thomas of drafting a freedom-destroying cocktail to show how little people worried about these types of broadsides in opinions.
The next time Thomas and Alito went for a drink, Thomas ordered a freedom-destroying cocktail.
So they have fun with each other in their opinions and dissents.
But
There has been a norm that you do not attack the integrity of the court itself when speaking publicly.
And that norm has completely been blown through, unfortunately, by many of the liberal justices who will sayβ Kagan, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Sotomayor.
Yeah, and they've been saying that it's political, which isβ
You know, it's just interesting.
We had decades of the court acting as a legislature saying, well, we wish people had voted for this thing and they didn't, so we'll say it's in the law.
That's political.
That's when you're a legislature of nine people.
Saying, this is not in the Constitution, so we shouldn't say it is, is the...
opposite of political.
It's what judges do.
But they will get very personally hurt and act in a way that undermines the integrity of the court itself.