4 ms·

Asserting that SCOTUS decisions are apolitical and "objective" is inherently political.

• SllX 5y ago
  Sure, but it’s a policy choice—a more polite way of saying a political choice—to treat SCOTUS like a legal institution rather than a political one. It is a legal institution, not a political one in the way Congress is explicitly a political institution that writes laws, but the seat holders are not apolitical machines who merely objectively look at what the law says because part of why they are there is that they have perspectives and they exercise this valuable thing called professional judgement that in the private sector people pay a lot of money for. Judicial philosophies which defer to the text as it is written (textualism) or interpret the text as it would have been understood in its original time and place (originalism) are treated with suspicion and politicized by those who believe the text should be interpreted through a modern reading and understanding of the text (living constitutionalism). SCOTUS will never be perfectly apolitical, not while it is staffed by people as I expect it to in perpetuity, but it should not also succumb to becoming a political institution instead of a legal one.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Asserting that SCOTUS decisions are apolitical and "objective" is inherently political. Maybe, it's definitely false, in any case.