Supreme court bad – this card is pretty bad placeholder til find better

A major recurring theme within every single interview, holding true when interviewing scholars, professionals, and activists alike, was the heavy distinction between the US Supreme Court’s nominal function, and its de facto function. Interviewees near-universally qualified the Court as a lawmaking institution, akin to a form of legislature. Positivist jurisprudence was usually recognized as a jurisprudential mode that would be preferable or even ideal for the 19 Supreme Court, but one that has not been adopted to any substantial degree. One legal advocate summed the matter up as follows: There’s what the Court claims to do and there’s what it actually does. And what it claims to do is exemplified by Chief Justice Roberts in his confirmation hearing, where he’s like, ‘I am the umpire, I just call shots as I see them, et cetera, et cetera.’ In practice, that is not really how the Supreme Court works. In practice, there is very real lawmaking. There is very real shifting of existing norms quite regularly. (C.P. Hoffman, Feb. 4th, 2022) Moreover, the Court’s function as a lawmaking body was broadly seen to be actively hostile to the queer community. One lawyer stated that “They are using their conservative majority not just to interpret the Constitution but set laws or define laws in a way that has a negative impact on a number of different communities or individuals.” That interviewee, as well as other legal professionals, noted repeatedly that current strategies of legal activism included restricting court cases to state and local courts, avoiding escalation to the Supreme Court whenever possible. This is because the Supreme Court is unlikely to rule in favor of the queer community, due in large part to its current political makeup. This dichotomy, in which the Supreme Court claims to make decisions objectively but appears to truly make them under bias and prejudice, could theoretically work in favor of the queer community rather than against them. However, interviewees list several factors which, in practice, have resulted in Court politicization usually harming queer causes. Justices’ lifetime tenure was a particularly substantial factor, as one professional lawyer stated: The younger generation of mainly attorneys that are coming up and those that will be on the court tend to skew more liberal and/or personal freedom, you know, understanding that everybody should be treated the same regardless of conservative or liberal views. (Interviewee 1, Jan. 21, 2022) 20 Lifetime tenure results in a court that can change only incrementally. This helped bring about conditions under which Supreme Court justices are broadly seen as entirely unrepresentative of the American public, which is a view held by almost all those who were interviewed, as that same lawyer outlined: I don't think that their opinions represent the majority of US citizens on a wide range of issues. Let's be honest, they're basically going to overturn Roe v. Wade, but 70% of the country doesn't have a problem with abortions. And that's just a statistical example. (Interviewee 1, Jan. 21, 2022) A second significant, repeating element seemed to be the Supreme Court’s independence from the rest of the federal government, or the lack thereof. One activist, when asked what mechanism created a divide between public opinion and the opinions of the justices, bluntly answered: “The court was packed by conservatives and a seat was stolen.” They further elaborated: “I wouldn't say that's specifically the justices’ fault. That's the fault of the previous administration.” This issue of legislative and Presidential interference in the Supreme Court was frequently tied to the problem of the Court’s politicization, with the Court being commonly seen as “almost an extension of the administrative sphere,” as one scholar put it. This politicization is closely associated with and even attributed to the queer community, as the community is seen as an “easy place to create wedge issues for people.” History of the Court and Community The bias of the Supreme Court and the failure of positivist jurisprudence are broadly seen as having become more pronounced over the past decades.