The Grey Lady Slams America's Top Judge

In its lead editorial today, the New York Times castigates the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts for betraying the American people:

"In the 1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over a Supreme Court that interpreted the Constitution in ways that protected the powerless — racial and religious minorities, consumers, students and criminal defendants. At the end of its first full term, Chief Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image. Time and again the court has ruled, almost always 5-4, in favor of corporations and powerful interests while slamming the courthouse door on individuals and ideals that truly need the court’s shelter.

"The Roberts court’s resulting sharp shift to the right began to be strongly felt in this term. It was on display, most prominently, in the school desegregation ruling last week. The Warren court, and even the Rehnquist court of two years ago, would have upheld the integration plans that Seattle and Louisville, Ky., voluntarily adopted. But the Roberts court, on a 5-4 vote, struck them down, choosing to see the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause — which was adopted for the express purpose of integrating blacks more fully into society — as a tool for protecting white students from integration.

"On campaign finance, the court handed a major victory to corporations and wealthy individuals — again by a 5-4 vote — striking down portions of the law that reined in the use of phony issue ads. The ruling will make it easier for corporations and lobbyists to buy the policies they want from Congress.

"Corporations also won repeatedly over consumers and small stockholders. The court overturned a jury’s award of $79.5 million in punitive damages against Philip Morris. The Oregon Supreme Court had upheld the award, calling Philip Morris’s 40 years of denying the connection between smoking and cancer “extraordinarily reprehensible.”

"In a ruling that will enrich companies at the expense of consumers, the court overturned — again by a 5-4 vote — a 96-year-old rule that manufacturers cannot impose minimum prices on retailers.

"The flip side of the court’s boundless solicitude for the powerful was its often contemptuous attitude toward common folks looking for justice. It ruled that an inmate who filed his appeal within the deadline set by a federal judge was out of luck, because the judge had given the wrong date — a shockingly unjust decision that overturned two court precedents on missed deadlines."

The Times accuses Roberts of wilfully lying his way through Senate confirmation hearings by claiming he believed in "judicial modesty" and wasn't ideologically bound. The paper gives Roberts a well-earned sharp stick in the eye for having claimed he wanted "to promote greater consensus" only to leave his court hopelessly riven with just about every major judgment a split, 5-4 decision.

"It has been decades since the most privileged members of society — corporations, the wealthy, white people who want to attend school with other whites — have had such a successful Supreme Court term. Society’s have-nots were not the only losers. The basic ideals of American justice lost as well."