Liberal legal activist Jesse Wegman is hopping mad about the Supreme Court. It needs “structural reform.”
Its sin? It has been “arrogating outsize power to itself over the past several years” and, also, in some cases, it “rules that it has no power to act.” (That’s the same paragraph!)
That’s why justices have been “speaking out much more frequently and informally than they once did.” Sure, they’re just saying the same things that they say in their opinions for the Court. But these comments are especially significant because they’re “off the bench, in public.” QED.
Wegman is jumping off a recent interview that Justice Elena Kagan gave at the Catholic University of America. He reads her — “I’m comfortable speculating,” he writes — as doing her bit to build public support for imposing term limits on justices, expanding the Supreme Court, or doing whatever it is progressives decide needs to be done to solve the “crisis of legitimacy” caused by the existence of a center-right supermajority.
As I’ve noted before, much of the press coverage of Kagan’s interview exaggerates how much hostility she displayed toward her conservative colleagues. But even that coverage noted that Kagan gave them, and their work product, some compliments. She went out of her way to defend those colleagues’ independence from Trump, for example. Wegman doesn’t mention any of that. Why not? I’m comfortable speculating.