Chamber of horrors

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They did it. Read the dissent and weep.

The American people’s belief in the rule of law would be shaken if they lost respect for this Court as an institution that decides important cases based on principle, not ‘social and political pressures.’ There is a special danger that the public will perceive a decision as having been made for unprincipled reasons when the court overrules a controversial ‘watershed’ decision, such as Roe. A decision overruling Roe would be perceived as having been made ‘under fire’ and as a ‘surrender to political pressure.’

These words are their summary of Casey, which in 1992 considered abortion too divisive an issue for the Court to challenge precedent. 

Just as we did here, Casey explained the importance of stare decisis; the inappositeness of West Coast Hotel and Brown; the absence of any “changed circumstances” (or other reason) justifying the reversal of precedent. “[T]he court,” Casey explained, “could not pretend” that overruling Roe had any “justification beyond a present doctrinal disposition to come out differently from the court of 1973.” And to overrule for that reason? Quoting Justice Stewart, Casey explained that to do so – to reverse prior law “upon a ground no firmer than a change in [the court’s] membership” – would invite the view that “this institution is little different from the two political branches of the Government.” No view, Casey thought, could do “more lasting injury to this court and to the system of law which it is our abiding mission to serve.” For overruling Roe, Casey concluded, the court would pay a “terrible price”.

Even as the House Select Committee has shown us how close Donald Trump came to destroying the legitimacy of the executive and legislative branches of the US government, it's clear he succeeded in the case of the judicial. 

Justice Jackson once called a decision he dissented from a “loaded weapon,” ready to hand for improper uses. We fear that today’s decision, departing from stare decisis for no legitimate reason, is its own loaded weapon. Weakening stare decisis threatens to upend bedrock legal doctrines, far beyond any single decision. Weakening stare decisis creates profound legal instability. And as Casey recognized, weakening stare decisis in a hotly contested case like this one calls into question this court’s commitment to legal principle. It makes the court appear not restrained but aggressive, not modest but grasping. In all those ways, today’s decision takes aim, we fear, at the rule of law.

The attempts to undermine the presidential election found many willing coconspirators in the desperately undemocratic right's efforts to make us a minority-ruled state (male, white, conservative 'Christian'). The Trump-appointed justices willing to support the long-standing malevolence of Thomas and Alito here were co-conspirators, too. Willing to accept appointment to the Court despite the vile shenanigans of Mitch and Don, their abandonment of stare decisis on the most polarizing issue in this polarized land shows an acceptance, even a celebration, of the fact that, as the dissenters put it,

"Power, not reason, is the new currency of this court’s decision-making." 

This is, to borrow a phrase from the Communist Party of China, rule by law, not rule of law. Without stare decisis, nothing is settled law... in which case, nothing is "law" in the sense required for civil life.

Woe woe woe, what horrors the enemies of our democracy have wrought - with more to come. Is there anything which can be done? The only thing that might salvage the credibility of SCOTUS would be a rebalancing. I wish Gorsuch or Barrett would step down, given the sleaziness of the conditions of their appointments, and Thomas' possible collusion with his seditious wife suggests he should, but these people are willing accomplices of the ruin of our democracy. Expect no noble acts from them. (They probably think God put them where they are precisely to perform this mischief.) Perhaps the president might add new justices chosen by a genuinely bipartisan process (the last chance proof that that is possible - if it is possible), maybe four? To show that this is a crisis requiring such drastic response, how about the Chief Justice, sidelined by the reactionaries and surely queasy at being coopted as they undermine his work to maintain the credibility of a right-leaning court, resign?