Mushroom Soup Monday

mushroomsoup147

Well, as expected, the Supreme Court issued two rulings this morning and I didn't like either. Neither one was quite as bad as it could have been but I think they were both wrong and so did four out of nine Supreme Court Justices in each.  Apparently, corporations are people but women aren't.

Am I misremembering some "good old days" when the Republican appointees didn't almost always vote the way Republicans wanted and the Democratic appointees didn't almost always vote to the satisfaction of their party? When all nine Justices were a bit more unpredictable instead of just one and sometimes two?

I recognize that sometimes these partisan decisions swing the way I want. I just find myself wishing we could respect these opinions as something more than the triumph of Democrats or Republicans managing to get their guy or gal on the High Court at the right moment. Congress works like that and it's supposed to work like that. Bills get passed or don't get passed because of who was elected at a certain time. You'd like to think that the Supreme Court, with its members appointed for life, would transcend that kind of partiality.

If these exact same questions had to be decided four or five years from now, the 5-4 decisions might go the opposite way, not because the issues or facts of the cases had changed but because someone on the court had died or retired due to old age and been replaced by a different partisan. Maybe I'm nostalgic for something that never really existed but I used to think the Supreme Court wasn't quite like that and you couldn't count on the Nixon appointees to vote as Nixon would have wanted, the Johnson appointees to vote all the way with L.B.J., etc.

Anyway, it's Monday so up goes the soup can. All it means is that I'm going to try to pay a little less attention to this site than usual today so posting may not be as plentiful. As you may have noted on previous Mushroom Soup Mondays, I often cannot stay away.