From the mouths of ideological babes
The Friday Letter / No. 515 / October 21, 2022
My mother and my mother-in-law never met but would have gotten along well on their shared belief that children should be seen and not heard.
There was a time when custom dictated that a new Justice joined the Supreme Court with a sense of humility, taking some time – perhaps a full term – to listen and learn, to get a sense of the Court's customs and procedures, a feel for how nine judges of differing judicial philosophy engage in the give-and-take of conducting the Court's only purpose: to judge the constitutionality of cases brought before it.
Adam Feldman, who runs a blog called Empirical SCOTUS, analyzed questions asked in the first eight oral arguments participated in by every sitting Justice. The median number of words is 3,469, asked by John Roberts in his first eight arguments. The average was 3,711.
In the new term just begun, Biden's affirmative action SCOTUS appointee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, didn't wait for her white superiors to grant her permission to speak. In her first eight cases she spoke 11,003 words. Clarence Thomas spoke 96 at his inaugural term in 1991.
Here is Feldman's words spoken analysis:
Brown-Jackson 11,003
Coney-Barrett 4,475
Sotomayor 4,409
Kagan 4,025
Roberts (median) 3,469
Gorsuch 2,657
Kavanaugh 2,385
Alito 883
Thomas 96
Note that Roberts, the Court's swing vote, is right in the middle. With Coney-Barrett the outlier, we see who those who spoke most are the liberals, those who spoke least the conservatives.
“Clarence Thomas – who once went a decade without speaking from the bench – didn’t ask a question until his second day of arguments when he joined the court in 1991,” Adam Liptak told the New York Times' Morning Briefing. “Jackson waited a little more than seven minutes. Her questions were confident and sharp. And like the other justices, she often used them to make points, not just to elicit information.”
Leftist media went gaga over Brown-Jackson's uppity entrance. The Huffington Post ran this fawning headline: “Ketanji Brown Jackson Gives the Supreme Court a History Lesson” in which she claimed to support originalism in an Alabama congressional redistricting case. This case is, of course, a racial one, Brown-Jackson's signature cause. Everywhere, mainstream media see her non-stop yammering as brilliant and courageous. Poppycock!
We will know more as the 2022-2023 terms unfolds, but Kentanji appears posed to carry the left's water and vote along party lines, talking more than listening, eager to foist her ideology on the Court and the country, aiding the drift of the federal judiciary into just another legislative body.
Recommended reading
“We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives”
John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist
“What to Do When Election Officials Keep Ignoring Voting Laws”
Margot Cleveland at The Federalist
Quotes for today
“The end of conservatism must lead to the end of Western civilization. When you don’t conserve the ideas and art, the religious moral values, and even the nuclear family that made Western civilization the most advanced civilization – materially, morally, scientifically, and artistically – ever devised, you will no longer have that civilization. You will have morally confused, emotionally broken, lonely, and angry young people—who will eventually wreak havoc on all that is good and worthy of surviving.
“We conservatives want to conserve the beautiful, the profound, and the wise. What does the Left wish to conserve? The answer is nothing. That’s why everything the Left touches, it destroys. The less you conserve, the more you destroy.” – Dennis Prager at American Greatness
Our correspondent Jake Phake is polling our readers with this one question: Is Joe Biden a bumbling fumbler or a fumbling bumbler?
Dear readers: I regret to say that I am taking a break from the Friday Letter to begin infusion chemotherapy for this little leukemia thing I am dealing with. I very much hope to return after treatment is complete. Thanks to all of you for your support in reading and sharing the Friday Letter.
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