When I was in junior high and high school, watching my beloved Indianapolis Colts was an exercise in self-flagellation. A perennial loser, Colts in the pre-Peyton Manning era was an acronym many of us understood to stand for Count On Losing This Sunday. I always thought the stadium announcer should opt out of the pregame national anthem to something far more appropriate for the hometown fans; something like Winger's classic power ballad "Headed for a Heartbreak."
Those years taught me a valuable lesson in managing expectations. Assume the worst, assume things are not going to go your way, assume that the universe is lined up totally against you, and then when the inevitable occurs, you're ready for it. And if, by an act of God, something does break your way, it will be cause for jubilance rather than relief.
This approach, while perhaps not the most biblical, has served me well when it comes to handling the consistent constitutional and ethical failings of the United States Supreme Court. It's as reliable as the sun rising in the east that Democrat presidents do not miss on their appointments. They demand ideological purity from their choices, and they get it without reservation.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not going to surprise anyone by writing the majority opinion to affirm marriage as an institution solely reserved for a man and woman. Sonia Sotomayor was not going to shock the world by voting to undo the legal travesty that is Roe v. Wade. Elena Kagan, and before her John Paul Stevens, were not going to astonish court watchers by joining an anti-Obamacare majority.
But notice that the Roe opinion was authored by a Republican appointee (Harry Blackmun, appointed by Richard Nixon). And the gay marriage decree was also composed by the same (Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan). And the decision to uphold Obamacare as constitutional was written by another Republican selection (John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush). If there is any ambiguity or mystery about the judicial philosophy of federal judges, it only cuts one way – to the right.
The media runs no think pieces on the alarming ideological purity of activist Democrat judges. There are no Sunday morning expert panels convened to collectively caution about the unscrupulous rigidity of Democrat appointed justices adhering to a rigid progressive ideology that threatens the court's credibility and independence.
No, that pressure is applied only on so-called conservative appointees, and is maintained for the duration of their tenure. No amount of genuflection before liberal pressure, no legal bone thrown to the left will absolve a Republican-appointed judge of the skeptical climate of mistrust that the media pretends surrounds them.
Chief Justice Roberts can side with the liberal wing of the court over half of the time, and he will still be labeled part of a 6-3 conservative majority. It's strategic, of course, putting Republican appointees in a media-created box that dangles their perceived legitimacy as an independent thinker out like a carrot to lure and tempt them away from the caricature. And it works. Over and over, it works.
The most recent example came last week when the same court that recently defended the religious liberty of Catholic adoption agencies to operate free from threat according to their religious conscience, denied the same liberty to an individual florist who didn't want to participate in a gay wedding.
Not only was the florist denied her constitutional rights of conscience, three supposedly conservative justices – John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – all refused to even hear her case.
The left celebrated:
The right was stunned:
While I get the left's exuberance, I'm disappointed the right is still surprised by things like this and hasn't learned to expect it. The solution to our nation's problems have never come from, and they will never come from, lawyers in black robes. It is a lazy approach to reforming American society to expect it will happen with a handful of strategically placed jurists.
If politics is downstream culture (it is), then the Supreme Court is even further downstream than that. Conservatives will be better off when they learn a pivotal SCOTUS case is like a pre-Peyton Colts game. Count on losing in their world, and get busy changing hearts in our own.
