'Scheming witches': Analyst sickened by Justice John Roberts' putdown of female colleagues
Chief Justice John Roberts and his right-wing colleagues on the Supreme Court are projecting their own insecurities and "hurt feelings" onto women who are calling out their flawed and dangerous rulings, wrote Dahlia Lithwick in a scorching analysis for Slate.
This comes after Roberts concluded the court's term with a ruling that gives former President Donald Trump a presumption of absolute immunity for "official acts," without clearly defining what those acts are.
And, in his majority opinion, he put down Justice Sonia Sotomayor's furious dissent as sounding "a tone of chilling doom" — a dismissal many described as condescending.
That was reinforced when former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb dismissed the dissent on CNN as “a little hysterical, and it really offered no analysis. A lot of screaming, no analysis.”
"Screaming. Insubstantial. Hysterical," wrote Lithwick. "What men call banshees, women call prophecy. And of course if there are any sitting justices on the Roberts court whose entire jurisprudence can be reduced to a soggy skein of hurt feelings and self-pity, they are not females."
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On the contrary, she wrote, Sotomayor's dissent, "Added interpolations that were not in her printed text and all but castigated her conservative colleagues. This is what frustration embodied looks like. And the failure to take that respectfully or even seriously? That is a play as old as the hills."
It's hard to swallow this criticism, wrote Lithwick, given that warnings that Roe v. Wade would be overturned were similarly dismissed as “hysterical” including by senators who voted to confirm Trump's Supreme Court Justices, like Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE).
Furthermore, the warnings that Trump will be emboldened by this ruling to defy the law and extrajudicially target opponents with the expectation he'll be immune from prosecution for it is completely founded, she noted — as Trump is already posting about the idea of a "televised military tribunal" for former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who voted to impeach him and investigated him over January 6.
"This isn’t hypothetical. This isn’t fearmongering. This is how Trump lives and will continue to live. It is how he governs and how he will continue to govern," Lithwick concluded — and people in power should stop laughing off women whenever they voice real fears about their rights and prospects.
"It’s almost as if the conservative justices’ commitment to originalism requires them to believe that women who raise any objection to their tidy paradigms should be viewed as either empty vessels or scheming witches. It’s almost as if they wish to lay down the tracks for just such a project. It’s almost as if in granting Donald Trump immunity, they may have found their path there."