“Anita Kunz’s cover for the July 22, 2024, issue focuses on what appears to many to be an existential threat to democracy: the far-right shift of the Supreme Court, and the conservative movement’s plans to commandeer it” - Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice”: The remaking of the Supreme Court in Donald Trump’s image. By Françoise Mouly/The New Yorker July 15, 2024.
Here’s the cover:
Note how almost huggable the liberal Justices are, each tenderly rendered in their individuality, openness and warmth. And how angry and closed the Trumps are - no need to tell them apart; they’re all interchangeable members of the “right-wing”, doing Trump’s work to destroy the country and perhaps the world. We don’t need to consider them as individuals, just as witting or unwitting (it doesn’t matter) conduits for the forces of evil.
No matter that three of these evil-doers were nominated by moderate Republicans long before Trump, ie, Bushes I and II - I guess because Republicans are really all the same, even it they weren’t thought so back then.
No matter that, overall, the Trump nominees have been surprisingly moderate on the bench. Don’t believe me? Check it out:
Note that Barret, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are bunched together, near the ideological center of the graph - pretty close to Anthony Kennedy’s line, at least in his later years when he was known as the swing vote on the Court. I guess nowadays he’d be considered just another right-winger.
But what about that horrible Immunity decision, you say, which clearly has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with partisan bias? Would you say the same about this legal opinion:
"The indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned function. ...Thus, the constitutional concern is not merely that any particular indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unduly impinge upon his ability to perform his public duties. A more general concern is that permitting such criminal process against a sitting President would affect the underlying dynamics of our governmental system in profound and necessarily unpredictable ways, by shifting an awesome power to unelected persons lacking an explicit constitutional role vis-a-vis the President. Given the potentially momentous political consequences for the Nation at stake, there is a fundamental, structural incompatibility between the ordinary application of the criminal process and the Office of the President."
For the record, the above opinion came from the Clinton Department of Justice, later reaffirmed by the Obama administration (here’s the link).