In Star Trek Next Generation’s two-part episode Reunification, Riker confronts a fat Ferengi smuggler about inventory missing from a spaceship scrap yard. The Ferengi smuggler responds, “Hypothetically speaking? I never learned to speak Hypothetical.”
Like so many SCOTUS nominees, the fat Ferengi doesn’t engage in hypotheticals. A SCOTUS nominee responds that way to queries such as how he or she might rule with regards to abortion rights, same sex marriage, voting rights or anything else that might reveal him or her as a partisan ideolog. “I don’t speak Hypothetical.”
Ask them about stare decisis, and they all claim to respect established precedent – if not a recently decided case, then at least a precedent with a half-century of decision and reassertion. Confirmation hearings are all pomp and circumstance signifying nothing, of course.
Despite the SCOTUS nominees’ vacuous assertions that they cannot respond to hypotheticals, this recent batch of SCOTUS appointees seems to have no difficulty hearing and adjudicating hypothetical cases brought before them. Nowhere is there a word about a plaintiff’s lack of standing because the case is based on a hypothetical rather than actual harm.
And precedent? Put your stare decisis where the sun don’t shine.