It happens to sports stars (for example, Ted Williams).
It happens to scientists (followup here, and see also my post deploring the “scientist as hero” narrative). Researchers get used to uncritical media coverage and then, all of a sudden, someone questions their assumptions or their methods, or someone finds out their numbers don’t add up, they’re on Retraction Watch, and all of a sudden they’re screaming about terrorism or Stasi or whatever. From the outside, such behavior is annoying, but at some level I get it: it can be disorienting to move from fawning NPR interviews and book blurbs to tough questions from skeptics.
And, as Dahlia Lithwick reports, it happens to federal judges too:
If the high court is not in fact behaving in a fashion that makes its decisions respected, the real question is: Why we are all zealously watching and reporting on its decisions as though they are immutable legal truths? . . . if the Supreme Court is no longer functioning as a real “court,” why are we mostly still treating its output as if it were simply the “law?” . . .
I wonder whether all the fury being directed by some of the Justices at journalists right now comes from the kid glove treatment they not only came to enjoy, but to expect? In covering the court as though the Justices were uninteresting and untouchable, did we reinforce a norm in which they believe now that any scrutiny is an attack?
This is not new: Supreme Court judges were controversial in the 1930s when they struck down New Deal laws, and they were controversial in the 1950s when they ruled school segregation to be unconstitutional. That said, I do get the impression that most of the national press took the court’s side in both these controversies, supporting the court’s conservative decisions in the 1930s and its liberal decisions in the 1950s, perhaps both times out of a sense that the court is a fragile branch of government that is necessary to the country but at the same time inherently weaker than the legislative and executive branches.
Anyway, the part of Lithwick’s article that really resonates with me is the idea that these judges (or, as they are ridiculously called, “Justices”) are used to nonstop deferential news coverage, to the extent that they flip out when they are treated with skepticism, not just regarding the reasoning of individual decisions, but their whole institutional role is being questioned. Just as in the replication crisis, we’re not just calling out individual researchers such as the disgraced primatologist, the ESP dude, the beauty-and-sex-ratio guy, the Why We Sleep guy, the nudgelords, etc etc etc; we’re also calling out the science and media establishment for establishing the conditions whereby they could run wild and not be questioned.
Again, not completely new: influential political figures called into question the legitimacy of the court after its anti-New-Deal rulings, its anti-segregation rulings, and its ruling on abortion, but maybe there’s been some cultural shift where the court is seen more generally as a partisan institution, more than before. Those earlier controversial rulings were presented as bad decisions by out-of-touch or out-of-control judges but without such a sense of the court as being a direct player in two-party politics. I guess that last bit connects to current debates in science, for example when the journal Nature endorsed Joe Biden for president.
With regard to the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and kid glove treatment, the John Oliver program video, Last Week Tonight, is screamingly funny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug
Here is some commentary:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/19/john-oliver-clarence-thomas-resign-1-million-offer
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/hbo-host-re-ups-million-dollar-offer-for-clarence-thomas-to-resign-i-still-have-the-contract/ar-BB1m3wu8
As is often pointed out, we have the best Supreme Court that money can buy.
Isn’t that point undermined by Thomas not accepting the offer?
Thomas can, and does, make many millions off wealthy “friends” (really lobbying donors), so no – not accepting a mere 1 million conditional on not taking more bribes does not undermine the point at all.
How large a bribe would Oliver need to offer to undermine that point?
Forbes has estimated net worths of the SCOTUS judges:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2024/02/15/the-net-worth-of-every-supreme-court-justice/?sh=71dbcbb851f8
Thomas is at 4 million (on the lower half of the court), so an extra million would be only 25% of that. However, he’s also been on SCOTUS since 1991, so that represents everything he’s accumulated over all that time, and barring radical life extension (he’s 75) he can’t expect to spend an additional amount of time that long. John Paul Stevens has the record for longest-lived SCOTUS justice at 99, but he retired 9 years before dying (Oliver Wendell Holmes retired at an older age, but only by months). Optimistically expecting Thomas to reach the same age on the court, he’s got less than half the time he’s already spent remaining.
Paul, Wonks, Anon:
This all reminds me of our discussions a few years ago regarding Harry Truman and Greg Mankiw’s grandmother and the hypothetical “jet ski made of diamonds.”
A short answer is that it’s hard for people to say no to free money. I guess this is related to the “mental accounting model” in the heuristics and biases literature. In addition to being fungible, money is a signal of value in our culture.
“… the court is seen more generally as a partisan institution” It would have been hard to attack the Warren Court as partisan, since he was a Republican, and, as I recall, some of the more conservative justices of the time, like Jackson, were Democrats. Maybe what we are seeing reflects the ideological re-alignments in the parties, so that Republicans now are consistently more conservative than Democrats. It wasn’t like that when I was young.
One possible difference is that Schechter Poultry Corp & Brown v Board were unanimous decisions. There are still a number of unanimous decisions made now, but the ones that get more coverage aren’t. It should also be noted that in the 30s there was the “Stitch in time that saved nine” when SCOTUS started ruling more favorably after threats of court-packing.
Fight for 13!
There’s is also a dramatically different media landscape today thanks to the internet:
1) thousandsof (inter)national media outlets and no local ones;
2) tens of thousands? of blogs, vlogs, podcasts and other forms of media generated by people who are known in some groups but would not previously have had access to (inter)national media (e.g. statisticians, economists, shrinks, healers, dealers and druggies etc etc etc) weighing on with their beliefs and views, many of whom don’t have any responsibility to any uphold any professional media standards (since they don’t work in media), much less have editors or bosses to provide constraints or guidance, so they’re utterly free to publish any BS they want (including me).
3) competition is stiff and wages are bad in the press, not to mention the p/v/blogosphere, so the need to hype is greater and the quality of the reporters is lesser
Plus:
4) English is spoken fluently by over a billion poeple, as opposed to probably less than a quarter that many half a century ago
5) the US throws its weight around and tweeks people in every corner of the world so many people world wide are interested in what goes on here
6) as we’ve seen recently the US population is far more diverse in origin than it was in 1960 and there are some extreme differences in view points.
I’m sure there are other relevant differences.
How obviously wrong would a Supreme Court decision have to be for people to not do what it says?
If we had a functioning Congress, the judges could be impeached. Or, the number of judges could be increased (to outvote the crazy, corrupt ones).
SCOTUS has already been disobeyed, by President Jackson.