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Finally got around to reading that unanimous SCOTUS opinion on the Colorado ballot, and hoo boy. I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave the legal analysis to qualified people, but tone is something I do understand. And folks, what we have here is a tone cop with a newly minted badge who is instructing us and her colleagues in a loud, booming voice.

I’ve had nothing but contempt for Justice Amy Coney Barrett ever since she trampled with unseemly haste over Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s freshly dug grave to snatch a lifetime SCOTUS sinecure from the Defendant’s dainty orange mitts. Everything about Barrett’s ascension was and is nauseating, including McConnell’s corrupt machinations to push the appointment through a week before voters bounced the Defendant out of office, Barrett’s bland-faced lies during the confirmation process, her supporters’ cynical cooption of motherhood to cloak the nominee’s religious zealotry, the repulsive celebratory super-spreader event, etc., etc., etc.

Barrett’s behavior in the role has been about as bad as we suspected it would be, from bolstering the Fed-Soc Bloc to impose theocratic and plutocratic rule on an allegedly secular and democratic country to public mewling in search of unearned respect and deference. Basically, Barrett is a turd like Alito with the abrasive edges sanded down and festooned with tasteful jewelry. Plus a reasonable expectation of two more decades ahead to immiserate Americans in the name of Jesus and money.

All that and more I expected. But now she’s appointed herself hall monitor, presumptuously telling Americans what they are required to conclude about the opinion:

“All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” Barrett wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”

In other words, don’t worry your pretty little heads about the fine print, even if it leverages congressional dysfunction to shield Trump from any conceivable electoral consequences for the coup attempt, and even as the same court’s decision to slow-walk the immunity case will effectively exempt him from timely criminal liability.

Barrett also had the nerve to admonish Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson to watch their tone:

“In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” Barrett wrote. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

Shrill. She means the liberal justices were being shrill about their disagreement with the corrupt majority’s overreach in the opinion. It’s grotesque enough that we’re expected to pretend this preening fraud has shreds of integrity and legitimacy she definitely doesn’t possess. Now she wants to be the tone police too. It’s too much. Fuck her and the high horse she rode in on.

Open thread.

Amy Coney Barrett: Tone PolicePost + Comments (133)