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QOTD: Mediocrity is Over-Rated
“The people I can’t stand are those who strike a delicate balance between logic and absurdity and congratulate themselves for not being extreme.” – Thomas Sowell
Chief Justice John Roberts, who balances his logical decisions with absurd ones, added to the absurd half of his ledger with his refusal to issue a temporary stay on Pennsylvania’s violation of its own election laws. After all, it is only a closely contested swing state; one that could decide the presidential election.
Pennsylvania has decided to accept mail-in ballots as late as three days after Election day, without a legible postmark. This will give dishonest vote counters three days to determine how many votes they need to manufacture to get their desired outcome.
Pennsylvania law states that ballots must be in by 8:00 pm on Election Day and be properly postmarked. The State Supreme Court decided to ignore that law.
Pennsylvania Republicans (and only Republicans) petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a temporary stay against the decision by the Pennsylvania Court. A stay would have required five votes by SCOTUS. It got four. The Chief Justice voted “No” without explanation.
Chief Justice Roberts’ defenders say he maintains a “balance” to protect the reputation of the Supreme Court. Otherwise, people might think the court is “partisan.”
It is an interesting concept. Making bad decisions to protect your reputation. Lifetime tenure was supposed to prevent that.
Some say Roberts is afraid that the Democrats will pack the Court if he makes too many decisions against them. The Democrats are threatening to pack the court anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Chief Justice. In other words, Chief, it didn’t work.
Also, when one strives to maintain a “balance” like that above, he or she will lose the trust of others. According to an article in National Review, neither the liberal nor the conservative Justices trust Mr. Roberts on second amendment issues, which is why they can’t muster the four votes necessary to hear a case.
The Supreme Court sat on the Pennsylvania petition for three weeks before rendering the decision. The internal discussions must have been frustrating for a sane person to hear.
When it comes to reputations, Chief Justice Roberts, there is no substitute for doing the right thing. Be bigger.
Published in Group Writing
The entire purpose of the law and judicial branch is to create a sense of justices and fairness in the populace. Both of these concepts lack any material objective criteria and are the manifestation of subjective human experience and emotion. Robert’s seeks to balance those emotions and govern them through the application of his rulings. He is doing his job. Thomas is up his own rear end pretending like he is doing something other than what he is doing which is catering to peoples emotions. Ultimately there is no right or wrong answer in the law there is just the subjective perception of satisfaction of the outcome. Consistently rule in a manner that increases dissatisfaction in total and you get social break down, and the law becomes even more meaningless than it already is as the state looses a socially acceptable means of social control.
Val,
This is not Western Civilization’s view. This is a Marxist view. The entire purpose of the law and judicial branch is not to create a sense of justice and fairness in the populace. The entire purpose of the law and judicial branch is to administer the law justly and fairly. You are misinformed.
Regards,
Jim
Two points one on topic one tangential. The tangential point, Marxism is Western Civilization at least as much at Locke and Adam Smith are. All products of the same cultural mill. You can not simply have Western Civilization mean only the things you like. It is all of it the good and the bad. The on topic point, you make my point exactly by saying the job is to administer the law justly and fairly? How do we know the law is just and fair except by looking at our own emotional reactions to it? The measure of the actions of the law and judicial branch are purely subjective. Therefore the function of these institutions is to maintain this subjective sense. One is either pleased by the law and judicial rules and therefore the law is fair and just or one is not and therefore it is unfair and unjust. This is how it functions societally, everything else is just story telling on our part to build up and firm up our view of the matter.
Jim,
Perhaps it’s not fair but sometimes when I look at Roberts, I can’t help but think of Senator Roman Hruska’s speech in the Senate when he gave his “endorsement” of G. Harrold Carswell for the Supreme Court,
“So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they? We can’t have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there.”
Of course, Carswell was voted down but, then, maybe we had Senators with just a little more intelligence…
In the case of Roberts, it’s mediocrity without the appropriate humility. It’s arrogance (or sophistry) that causes his defenses of the indefensible.
Ah, I see Protagoras is in the house. When other respondents have said you are at odds with Western Civilization, this is what they meant. This is the sophistical conclusion that, because judgements of justice are judgments of subjects, they can therefore be nothing more than expressions of subjective preference. This is at least a non sequitur.
You are correct that the sophistical position is a part of Western Civilization, in the sense that anything good always has a degenerate form stalking it, as there is always counterfeit money lurking where real money is found. Western Civilization got to where it is because sophistry, while its influence has waxed and waned through history, was rejected by the main current of Western culture – at least until recently, when its influence has reached perhaps fatal levels.
Getting into a refutation of sophistry is too much for a comment thread, so I’ll just leave it at this: Our judicial system is not ordered to sophistry, but to the conviction that men can transcend their subjective preferences and at least approach true justice, if not always achieve it. We are not doomed to merely acting out our private preferences. This is why judges wear black robes – to symbolize that they are on the bench (at least attempting) to do something more than act out private desires.
The sophistical position, of course, must put the most cynical reading onto people who attempt to fulfill that role, as you do of Judge Thomas, since it categorically denies such transcendence is possible. This bad faith is one reason to be skeptical of sophistry. But, again, you pay no compliment to Judge Roberts, since it just means he was a liar when he was proposed for the Supreme Court, pretending to accept the premises of our judicial system when in fact he denied them.
Justice and fairness are determined by an elected legislature, operating within the latitude allowed by the State and U.S. Constitutions. Do they do a perfect job? Nope. Legislatures create laws by a process that resembles sausage making. Once a consensus is reach that can get enough votes, it is written down and becomes law, unless vetoed by the executive. A badly written law may be subject to interpretation, but a clearly written law, such as a deadline, is not.
November 3rd is November 3rd regardless of your value system.
There is no guarantee that everyone will like the law or think that it is fair, and a judge is entitled to his own opinion about the law.
A judge is allowed to have an opinion about the law, but he is not allowed to act on that opinion unless the law violates the Constitution. The judges job is to apply the law as written. There is nothing subjective about how to apply a law that says ballots shall be received by 8 pm on Election Day.
If a judge were to rule that all ballots must be received three days before Election Day, despite what the law says, it would be easy to see that the judge is objectively wrong.
Same logic applies to moving the deadline to three days after.
Great comment and well written. I’ll admit I had to look up “Protagoras.”
Well allow me to attempt to interpret a deadline. The vote is cast when the ballot is filled and put in the mail. That’s like pulling the lever or pushing the big button on the machine. But the laws of time and space say that this vote takes longer to reach the counters than the in person vote. Both legal votes and both should be counted. The election day deadline for receiving is unreasonable and violates the rights of those who cast their ballots by mail on election day. Two laws are proven to be in conflict a judge picks which law wins out in this case since both can not be followed.
It’s bad enough that some buffoonish comment section troll can type that with a straight face but to imagine actual judges proposing/supporting such tortured logic seems too preposterous to believe.
Oh, wait. Roberts.
We’re screwed.
Thank you for the compliment. I never really knew how to think until I began to read Plato. And one of the most surprising things about him is how many ideas I thought of as “modern” were actually anticipated by him. The dialectic between philosophy and sophistry is, for instance, eternal.
In your interpretation, November 3rd is actually November 6th?
“Legible postmarks” actually means “illegible postmarks”?“Matching signatures” means “Non-matching signatures”? Subjectivity sets you free!You’re “allowed” to interpret deadlines anyway you want. Judges and Justices, on the other hand, are expected to interpret the laws as they are actually written. If the law as written is unfair, then it is up to the legally elected legislature (that is, chosen by the people) to change it. Civics 101.
EDIT: I struck out the sentence on postmarks, because they aren’t mentioned in the law pertaining to ballots. Since the ballots have to be received by election day and not later, postmarks wouldn’t matter under the law properly applied.
There is no conflict with a second law. Here is the text of the relevant portion of the law.
There is nothing I could find in the law that say a ballot filled-out on election day is legal, if it isn’t received on time. Here is the whole law.