If you wish to consider how bad the mainstream press covering the Supreme Court is, consider that CNN Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic — the biographer of Chief Justice John Roberts — not only wrote an article titled “Supreme Court justices are showing their willingness to boost conservative causes,” but starts it thus: “The Supreme Court’s reversal of abortion rights last year deviated so much from traditional decision-making that it might have soon appeared an aberration.”
I’m sorry, deviated how? Because it actually adhered to the Constitution? Because it produced a result that journalists disliked? It certainly isn’t that the Court overturned precedent, which it has done on innumerable prior occasions. It’s not that it ruled in favor of government against claims of individual rights — the whole jurisprudence of the New Deal was about that. Indeed, one need not go far into this very article to find Biskupic casting the Court’s enforcement of the individual rights of workers against the government as an ominous development:
The high court has also recently fortified its openness to Christian conservatives, agreeing on Friday to hear a case brought by a former mail carrier who sued the US Postal Service after being disciplined for refusing to work on Sundays.
But spare a tear for the emotional trauma of liberals, for the first time in so many decades finding themselves on the short end:
For their part, the court’s liberals are still working through their anguish. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, senior among the three on the left, told an audience earlier this month that the abortion decision left her “shell-shocked” and “deeply, deeply sad.” Her “sense of despair” has been tempered, she said, by a desire to keep fighting and a conviction that the judicial tide will eventually turn. “It may take us time,” she told an audience at the Association of American Law Schools, “but I do believe we’ll go back on the right track.”