The ‘Deputy Chief Justice’ Defends the Conservatives

Deputy Chief Justice, as we like to call Associate Justice Elena Kagan, is defending her conservative colleagues on the high bench against charges that they are a “rubber stamp” for President Trump. “I think that that is a bad rap,” Justice Kagan avers. Her comments offer some counterpoints at a time when liberals are sowing doubts over the court’s legitimacy and mooting a scheme to pack its bench with more justices to secure a compliant majority of leftists.“I don’t see this as a court that is just like, ‘We’re just going to rubber stamp what the current administration does.’ You know, quite the opposite,” Justice Kagan told a conference at Bellevue, Washington. The high court, after all, rejected Mr. Trump’s bids to unilaterally impose tariffs and rewrite birthright citizenship policy, blocked the president’s attempt to fire a Fed board member, and denied his power to send the National Guard into big cities.The Nine even just affirmed a lower court ruling that Mr. Trump had to fork over some 5.6 million spondulix to columnist E. Jean Carroll. “You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do,” Justice Kagan asserted. “I can really dislike that,” she said, “but it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration.”The defense of the conservative majority’s judgment and, in effect, the high bench’s legitimacy, are consistent with Justice Kagan’s reputation as an institutionalist and a consensus builder. As evidence of that, she has not infrequently joined the high court’s conservatives in the majority, not merely defended them. Her comments yesterday are in line, too, with what these columns have suggested could be her aspirations to succeed Chief Justice Roberts.Justice Kagan’s appraisal of her colleagues’ jurisprudence is a far cry, too, from some of the heated rhetoric from liberal critics. Feature, say, the Nation magazine’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, who reckons that “the Supreme Court’s recent spate of decisions rubber-stamping Donald Trump’s lawless use of executive power” is of a piece with “the court’s own ongoing power grab.” It’s to Justice Kagan’s credit that she would defend the court on this head.By contrast, the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy is increasingly being undermined by figures like, say, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has been sowing doubts over the personal integrity of the conservative justices. The ascendant far left of the Democratic party, which sees the high court’s conservative majority as an impediment to their policy agenda, is also fermenting on plans to reform the court to impose a liberal majority.Chief among these critics are what a recent poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters finds are the two leading candidates in the 2028 presidential contest, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the erstwhile transportation secretary, Peter Buttigieg. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has decried a “dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power” by the Nine. AOC’s prescription is to “expand the court.”Mr. Buttigieg, too, has been urging critics to confront what he calls a “rogue” Supreme Court, suggesting it is “time to think big.” He asserts that “nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there have to be nine Supreme Court justices.” He insists that packing the court wouldn’t “even take a constitutional amendment.” Such lack of respect for the high bench, and the rule of law, adds resonance to the defense of the Nine’s integrity by Deputy Chief Justice Kagan.

The ‘Deputy Chief Justice’ Defends the Conservatives

The ‘Deputy Chief Justice’ Defends the Conservatives

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