Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
No reasonable person now objects to recognizing the Supreme Court as a political body – at least in reference its six-person super majority. And few would question that the same majority is an aggressively Christian body, Roman Catholic in flavor. Politics and religion have made this Supreme Court supreme in ways not intended by the founders. Possessing Truth, they are not only entitled to rule but obliged to do so. Political, faith-based, and omniscient, Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett can be legitimately described as a religious junta.
Justice Alito has stated in the Wall Street Journal that “No provision of the Constitution gives them [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court – period.” Salem Sam, so-called for scolding opinions that recall the Salem Witch trials, sums the Court’s attitude: a flair for infallibility and a taste for political infighting. Reading Alito we can imagine the Court one day declaring the legislative and executive branches, petrified and chaotic as they are, unconstitutional. And going further, declaring the United States an officially Christian county. Shocking, seemingly impossible decisions? Perhaps. But not beyond the Court’s ambitions or sophist skills.
Piety is most obvious in a category of cases that are fundamentally and obviously theological. One example was the minor, but edifying, 2022 Kennedy v Bremerton School District ruling, in which a 6-3 majority ignored decades of precedent dealing with the first amendment’s Establishment Clause. The majority held that a football coach, Joseph Kennedy, who conducted post-game prayers on the football field, had a first amendment right to do so, despite the fact that a number of players felt coerced: no pray, no play. Justice Gorsuch, who wrote the opinion, defended what he called “quiet personal prayer.” He seems not to have suspected that prayer, even whispered, is loud on the 50 yard line.
Another theological example is, of course, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. It was a breathtaking turning away from medical expertise, treating the question as purely, and solely, theological, faith and fetus dogma. Also therefore, a turning away from decades of precedent and accepted law. That is, elements of American jurisprudence that all on the Court had sworn to uphold in both Judicial and Constitutional oaths.
Theological motivation shines through in the Court’s passion, a general need to blast away at human rights and humane attitudes in the spreading of Truth. In a minor case in Idaho, Salem Sam wrote in the awkward position of dissent. Part of his text, according to Linda Greenhouse, the longtime Court observer, was “…close to unhinged.” And: “It would be nice to think that Justice Alito cares as much for women as he does for fetuses.”
In these cases there was the determined, quick move to toss evidence, a move to faith as fact. It is a practice common to dictatorships, lay or religious. As Masha Gessen summarized in a New York Times op-ed, “Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy.”
A second broad category of decisions, slightly less obvious, is that of ostensibly secular topics seen through the justices’ religious prism.
In a 2024 case, Ohio vs. EPA, the Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency, unwilling to lower the spread of pollutant, ozone-causing chemicals. The Court’s prism, clouded by its omniscient scorn for expertise, showed up in a small but indicative lapse. As the Scientific American pointed out in October of that year Justice Gorsuch’s opinion several times confused nitrogen oxide, a noxious pollutant that affects the lungs, with nitrous oxide, laughing gas. Neither he or his staff caught that error nor, recognizing they had not science backgrounds, were they moved to fact check. They did not know what they did not know. Or care to know. If that was not contempt, it was certainly casual indifference to science and the diseased lungs that will be the price of indifference.
A broader Court decision that placed inexpert, omniscient opinion on a pedestal was the overturning in June of 2024 of the so-called Chevron doctrine. The prevailing position at that time was that courts should defer to agency expertise in dealing with fuzzy federal law. The Scientific American, in the same issue mentioned above, did not pull punches: “The decision enthrones the high court – an unelected majority – as a group of technically incompetent…politicos in robes with power over matters that hinge on vital facts about pollution, medicine, employment and much else.”
The decision was deft. It did not get on the faith-as-fact trolley, applying faith to single pieces of legislation that might run afoul of dogma. Rather, it changed procedure, taking expertise out of an entire class of courtroom tests and handing it over to presiding judges. Whether those jurists shared the junta point of view was not important, could not realistically be made important in the myriad cases that the Supreme Court could not hope to review. But it did mean that decisions previously dependent on science would now be leveraged by opinion, an opinion-as-fact subjective change. Chief Justice Roberts, writing with striking condescension for the majority, saw the previous doctrine as “fundamentally misguided.” And that, “Congress expects courts to handle technical statutory questions.” A laughable concept, indeed.
The Court’s religious majority can legitimately be described as a junta because it is a group taking over the country by judicial force. It is a cloaked, somewhat gloved force; the ethically pliable jurists, are nimble enough to hide motive and nonsense from all but the most attentive citizens. It is force nonetheless. Our founders were familiar with religious persecution. Not the alleged persecution of innocent Christians, so popular with today’s right, but persecution by other, often well meaning, religious officials.
Why bother pointing all this out? Trump has a similar playbook and is in process of dismantling the country, a country many already see as post-democracy. Witness the quack parade of cabinet appointments. Witness the autocratic crime. That Trump is an irreligious scoundrel cannot have escaped the Court. They don’t care. A fact clearly indicated by their grant of immunity in Trump vs. United States. It is also likely that the Court is confident that incompetence will bring down the administration without its help – in the meantime provide riveting distraction. Attention must be paid to the gloved force.
The Supreme Court’s majority is a functioning, united, group within the only functioning branch of government. Wedged between Putin’s useful fool and hapless, venal legislators, they are working toward a theocratic end to the glorious American experiment. Dementors, differing from the pagan president only in motivation: God over grift. Future decisions damning the legislative and executive branches, and a creating junta-led theocracy are not far-fetched.
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