I started thinking about this a couple of weeks ago when I heard Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argue, in the case of Alabama’s gerrymandered Congressional map, that the doctrine of constitutional originalism required that the Alabama electoral map be found unconstitutional. Hers was a dazzling bit of judicial Jujitsu, I think, and genius as well.
That’s when it struck me. The conservative justices are much less about Justice and the Constitution than they are about Winning. They claim to be originalists in their interpretation of the Constitution, but I suspect that they will show us in the Alabama case that they are originalists only to the point that it serves their conservative ideology. At the point where originalism negates their preconceived right-wing ideology, they will abandon originalism. Let’s see if time proves me wrong.
There is something similar among MAGA Republicans who cry foul about teaching an American History that lays bare the Genocide of Indigenous Americans and the Enslavement of Africans in order to present a whitewashed history of America that glorifies Europeans and their descendants from Cristobal Colon (Columbus) to George Washington to Trump. They are against teaching a history that may make a majority children question their idealized version of our country’s past in order to justify the teaching of the whitewashed fiction.
The same MAGAts that decry Sharia Law gaining a foothold in the USA are ready to replace America’s secular rule with White Christian rule. They’re against the contamination of our law with religion until doing so serves their own agenda.
I think that we all need to go to the Dojo to study and practice the Jujitsu of argument that Justice KBJ has shown us.