Another Norm Shredded, Supreme Court Edition

OK, so maybe I'll dip my toe in the toxic sludge just a little.  I just want to point out that Trump, indirectly in this case, has managed to shred yet another norm in our politics.

Let's face it.  Not to be cynical, but underneath all fancy theories of what the Supreme Court should do, everyone really wants it to do the same thing.  Rule in their favor.  It's just that up until now most of us have managed to rationalize it.  We claim that if the Supreme Court would just adopt the right theory of jurisprudence and be strictly impartial, we would always win, or at least almost always.

John Roberts claimed that he would be a neutral arbiter, just calling strikes and balls.  Gorsuch assured us that he would implement the vision of the Founding Fathers.  That the vision of the Founding Fathers looked a lot like the Republican Party platform simply meant that the Republican Party was in perfect alignment with what the Founding Fathers wanted.  The fact that a neutral arbiter calling strikes and balls always seemed to side with big money interests might be written off as coincidence.  Indeed, I have heard conservatives proposing views of the Supreme Court so mechanical that it sounded like a sort of supercomputer.  Program it with the law, key in the specific facts, and it would spit out the one right answer as reliably as a mathematical equation.  (Then why bother having judges at all, one wonders).

This is not to claim innocence for our side.  Conservatives at least claimed that the proper role of the Supreme Court was to pretend we still lived in 1787 and ignore all evidence to the contrary.  Liberal theories were often so incoherent as not to be theories at all so much as wish lists. 

But up until last week, Republicans could pretend, even to themselves, that they wanted a neutral arbiter and were convinced they would win any case before the Supreme Court based on the sheer merits of their case.  Then Kavenaugh came out swinging, making an intemperate partisan speech and promising (in effect) to be an openly partisan judge.  And Republicans suddenly realized that was what they had really wanted all along.

Without Trump in office, it would never have happened.

And so another norm is lost.