EDITORIAL: The Supreme Court has become an unfunny joke

There was a time in this country when we all had a lot of respect for the US Supreme Court, the highest court in the land. We believed that lifetime appointments of justices gave them independence, placing them beyond the reach of political concerns. And, indeed, many SCOTUS judges defied the politics of those who appointed them in the pursuit of justice.

That’s over, though. The current court has become a cruel joke on the public as they continue to make decisions that harm the people and help their masters.

Their decisions in the last week would be hilarious if they weren’t so devastating to millions of Americans. It seems hypocrisy is not recognized by this court.

People who understood how Clarence Thomas came to be a Supreme Court Justice — affirmative-action, both in his entry into Yale and his position on the court to replace the other Black justice, Thurgood Marshall — watched with mouths agape as he joined five of his conservative colleagues to end affirmative action for the rest of the nation.

People who know that Justice Brett Kavanagh’s loans mysteriously disappeared before he joined SCOTUS, and that his own wealthy family financed his Yale education, scoffed as he sided with the conservative majority to end President Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program.

But the worst of this last slate of decisions before the court’s summer recess was 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which the plaintiff, Lorie Smith, lied about the circumstances that brought her before the court.

Smith said she was interested in designing wedding websites, but that she would not make them for gay weddings because of her sincerely held religious beliefs. As part of her complaint, she said she had turned down a prospective couple, known only in court documents as “Stewart and Mike,” because of her faith.

But it turned out that there is no Stewart and Mike. Smith had entirely fabricated the anecdote that brought her before the highest court in the land.

Does that matter? SCOTUS said it did not: Smith had filed for a “pre-enforcement challenge,” meaning she was looking for a legal way to discriminate against the LGBTQIA2S+ community regardless of whether any of them wanted to hire her in the first place.

Such a phenomenal waste of time and resources. Such hate sown among our country for something that did not even happen. And it further erodes trust in one of our sacred institutions, which these days is comprised mostly of political hacks hiding in black robes.