Who would have thought Justice Breyer was MAGA?

Earlier this week, retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer penned an op-ed in The New York Times about friendship among the court’s justices. And about collegiality.

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Reading the piece quickly, a person might be inclined to regard Breyer’s op-ed as “well meaning” or at least “harmless” drivel. We’re clearly supposed to think, how nice, how quaint! Why can’t we all just get along the way the justices do?

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The Roberts court is a Moloch set on devouring the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community, while preserving the rights of mass shooters to amass deadly arsenals, but Breyer wants us to know that “in my 28 years on the court I did not hear a voice raised in anger.”

Why the hell not? Why weren’t you, Steve, sitting there screaming at your conservative colleagues, or asking everyone who would listen to stop your “friends” from hurting people? Why do you think intellectual detachment in the face of active horror is a virtue, when it’s more like a sin? Why do you think the loss of public decorum is a bigger threat to the Supreme Court’s institutional standing than its self-inflicted loss of ethics, impartiality, and accountability?

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Breyer works overtime to try to humanize the justice[s]—to get people to see them as regular people, not nuclear weapons deployed against fundamental rights. As columnist Hayes Brown explains, the “core” of Breyer’s essay “emphasiz[es] the humanity of justices who are more than willing to de-emphasize the humanity of others in their decisions.” Breyer’s task would be a lot easier, however, if the justices themselves treated people as human beings, instead of mere pawns in their ideological wars.

  Elie Mystal @ The Nation

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.