Three Liberal Stooges on the Supreme Court

ya think?

How about the three liberal women on the US Supreme Court? Can I be the first one to compare them to the incomparable Three Stooges?

See, I have a notion that the problem with Affirmative Action and Diversity and Equity is not that they are unjust — although they are — but that they are a mistake. You just want to hire the best person for the job, and forget about race and gender and the latest fabulousness with LGBT.

Otherwise you get people promoted beyond their competence. They do stupid things when something sensible is required. Or they do average things when something exceptional is required.

Take the Three Girl Liberal Rump on the Supreme Court. I suppose that Elena Kagan is OK. But Sonia Sotomayor seems barely competent. And Justice Jackson, if her first two days on the Court are any indication, is Clue Less.

That’s a change. Love her or hate her, the Notorious RBG was a Smart Jewish Kid. Justice Ginsburg had the intellectual chops to shine on the Supreme Court and make liberal folly almost look like wisdom.

I suspect that Justice Kagan is almost up to the mark in writing dissents against the conservative majority on the Court. But Sotomayor and Jackson? Maybe Chief Justice Roberts will take pity on them and write their dissents for them.

Do we care? Does it matter?

Well, I’d say that it is great fun watching the Three Stooges tumble around at the movies. But not so much on the Supreme Court.

Let’s call it “The 1619 Syndrome.” It’s all very well for Nikole Hannah Jones to get a leg up at The New York Times to write her racist screed with the narrative that the US was always about slavery. But if you chaps at The New York Times want to do that I’d say you want to hire a Marx or a Marcuse to make your point. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Marx and Marcuse were smart. Marx mixed up a pretty good goulash of Hegel and the classical economists; Marcuse baked a pretty good pie out of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. NHJ? Not so much.

Now I hope and expect that the conservative majority on the current Supreme Court will be taking the whole liberal agenda to the woodshed over the next decade or so. Therefore, I’d say that it would be helpful to liberals to give their best shot in critiquing the conservative legal juggernaut. And surely there are lots of conservative ideas that could be improved by a sharp liberal critique. I just don’t think that Kagan-Sotomayor-Jackson are up to the job.

Of course, maybe I am naive. Maybe, when a great political narrative is heading for the exits, the best thing is to get it out on the loading dock and into the trash compacter as soon as possible and clear the decks for a new era with new ideas. That’s the way the market economy works: the old companies go broke and get replaced by new ones. So why not the legal world as well?

Well, based on my understanding of things like the Common Law, the legal world is different. The problems are eternal, and each new generation gets its chance to chisel at the legal edifice and fix a problem or two.

So you need to send your best to the Supreme Court. That’s what I think.