Justice Kennedy's retirement timing — an example of our "conservative" judiciary's too-characteristic dishonor

© 2018 Peter Free

 

30 June 2018

 

 

Most of what is written about the US Supreme Court — outside of legally knowledgeable circles — is grossly ignorant

 

Like the claim that Justice Anthony Kennedy is (or was) a valued legal centrist.

 

Kennedy's rabid "conservatism" shows up, not only in the majority of his legal opinions, but in the timing of his announced retirement start date. He is scheduled to leave the court on 31 July, long before the November 2018 mid-term elections, which are currently expected to reflect (some degree of) an anti-Trump backlash.

 

 

Think about this timing

 

Would not a conscientiously honorable person — someone who actually believed in the (pretend) democracy that the United States claims to have — have waited to topple himself from the Bench until after the public had made its political will known?

 

Not Justice Kennedy.

 

It evidently was important to Mr. Alleged Centrist to give President Trump and Mitch ("Evil Turtle Man") McConnell an unobstructed shot at loading the Golden Bench with yet another Mammon-based humanity-loather.

 

 

The moral? — Do not call a plutocracy-worshipper, a political centrist

 

Let us more accurately remember Justice Kennedy for his (intellectually idiotic and plutocrat-toadying) Citizens United opinion. You know, the one that put the last nail in the United States' democracy coffin.

 

Pigeonhole him, too, for the intentionally democracy-defying timing of his retirement. This is not institutionally honorable behavior.

 

Yet it is, for the most part, characteristic of the Court's historically representative plethora of grasping atavists.