In 2005, President George W. Bush’s nominee, John Roberts, became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Five years later, just over one quarter of the country (27%) disapproved of him. By last year, that disapproval number had risen to nearly half the nation: 46%.

Since 2021, Gallup reports, the Supreme Court’s disapproval rating has consistently remained in the mid to upper 50s—a roughly ten-point increase compared to the previous decade. The majority of Americans have an apparent growing dissatisfaction with a court that wields ultimate authority while becoming increasingly secretive and activist on some of the nation’s most consequential issues.

While the Supreme Court’s job is not to make decisions based on popularity contests, it relies on the other two branches of the federal government to enforce its rulings. And when the Supreme Court’s credibility falls into question, some warn, our institutions may be at risk.

In October, Bloomberg Opinion’s Noah Feldman warned the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy crisis is getting worse.”

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“Democrats’ faith in the court began to fail after the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, then went into freefall over the last couple of years,” Feldman wrote. “They worry the justices aren’t sufficiently ethical. They deplore the eagerness of the court’s conservative majority to overturn 50 years of precedent on issues like abortion and affirmative action. They are appalled at the court’s defiance of originalism — the idea that Constitutional law should rest on the document’s original meaning — to grant criminal immunity to former President Donald Trump for official acts while president.”

Nearly two years ago the Alliance for Justice (AFJ), a progressive coalition of nearly 140 organizations “advocating for a fair and independent justice system,” published a piece warning that the Supreme Court was “destroying its own legitimacy.”

“The Court’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted,” William W. Taylor, III, wrote at the AFJ. “It has a far-right agenda and the scholarship informing its decisions is often questionable. Worse, new details have come to light of relationships some justices have had with wealthy ideological soulmates, including those with interest in cases before the Court. The Court’s credibility and the public’s acceptance of its decisions depends upon trust that it is not subject to outside influence. While lobbying may be common and acceptable in the legislative and executive branches, it is not — nor ought not to be — conceivable in our courts.”

The New York Times on Tuesday took a deep dive into the behind-the-scenes conversations at the end of the summer of 2023 among the Supreme Court justices as they weighed whether or not to establish a code of ethics, amid a nation angered by numerous reports of what many see as blatant corruption.

“Last year, pressure on the court and the chief justice intensified. Journalists revealed that Justice Thomas had accepted far more largess from Harlan Crow, a conservative donor, than he had disclosed, including decades of travel on private jets and a superyacht, and boarding school tuition for his grandnephew. The public uproar also reflected another concern: Virginia Thomas, his wife, had been involved in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” The Times reports.

“Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process,” The Times adds, revealing that “behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.”

In the end, the justices all signed onto a new code of ethics for the nation’s highest court, but one that “had no means of enforcement.”

It was quickly criticized.

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Liberals on the court have since gone public with their apparent frustration that although there is finally a code of ethics, there is no way to enforce it.

“All three liberals — Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson — supported enforcement, The Times reports.

“Rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this one — this set of rules — does not,” Justice Elena Kagan said in July.

“I haven’t seen a good reason why the ethics code that the Supreme Court adopted shouldn’t be enforceable,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson  said. “Other justices have posited certain ways in which it could be made enforceable but we have not yet determined or decided to do that.”

By contrast, at least some of the majority right-wing justices appear opposed to any code, certainly one that would have methods of enforcement.

“In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable,” The Times revealed. “Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.”

The Times also reveals that the justices “seemed to codify their own preferences” when they drafted, or signed off on the code of ethics.

Those preferences appear largely financial.

The justices “gave themselves no firm restrictions on gifts, travel or real estate deals. Nothing in the new rules appears aimed directly at the trips and gifts Justice Thomas accepted. The code says only that justices should uphold the dignity of the office and comply with existing gift guidelines, in separate federal rules, which make allowances for ‘personal hospitality.’ Justice Thomas has maintained that his nondisclosure of gifts and free travel did not violate those rules,” according to The Times. Other legal experts disagree, with some saying he broke the law.

Since signing the new code of ethics, “questions about the justices’ behavior have continued. The Times revealed that two provocative flags associated with the Jan. 6 riot had flown at the homes of Justice Alito and his wife. The second was displayed at his New Jersey beach house just as the justices were considering the new ethics rules. That summer, he also accepted concert tickets from a far-right German princess. He later disclosed those, but in keeping with the new rules, said nothing about his free stay at her 500-room Bavarian palace.”

Last month, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), among the Senate’s top proponents of Supreme Court reform, wrote: “As long as the Court maintains a secretive billionaire gifts program for justices and unique immunity from ethics scrutiny for itself, and as long as its decisions predictably align with those billionaire interests, its reputation will continue to crash.”

READ MORE: This Michigan Lawmaker Wants to ‘Make Gay Marriage Illegal Again’

Republican state lawmaker Josh Schriver, who calls himself “Michigan’s most conservative state representative” and a “White rapper,” said Monday he wants to “Make gay marriage illegal again.”

Rep. Schriver insists ripping apart the families of millions of Americans and stripping them of their civil and constitutional rights is “not remotely controversial, nor extreme.” Nearly seven out of ten Americans (69%) say same-sex marriage should be legal—which it has been nationwide in the United States for nearly a decade.

He followed that up just hours later by declaring, “20 years ago, Barack Obama was more conservative on marriage than many Republicans today. America only ‘accepted’ gay marriage after it was thrusted into her by a perverted Supreme Court ruling. America 2124 doesn’t have to be as dysfunctional as America 2024. ORDER! ORDER!”

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(In 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the same constitutional rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples, the majority of the country was already in support of marriage equality.)

In addition to calling for a ban on same-sex marriage, Schriver has suggested the “endgame” for Republicans should be banning transgender medical care for everyone, as The Advocate reported in January. He also says not allowing conscience exemptions for DMV employees to discriminate against transgender Michiganders “is going to lead to (more) Christian persecution.”

Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel on Monday responded to Rep. Schriver, asking: “Please explain how dissolving my marriage, or that of the hundreds of thousands of other same-sex couples living in America, provides a benefit to your constituents or anyone else. You’re not interested in helping Michiganders. You want only to hurt those you hate. Shame on you.”

The Daily Beast in February called Schriver a “far-right lawmaker, who is also a Christian rapper.” It reported that Schriver says “God called me” to his seat as a state lawmaker.

Controversy broke out after Schriver had “shared a racist conspiracy theory online.” He “wasted no time doubling down on his rhetoric—even after losing his state House committee and staff as a result.”

“’I’m a White rapper and most conservative voting Representative in Michigan,’ Rep. Schriver, who rhymes about his voting record and Jesus, wrote … on X. ‘I guess it was only a matter of time before I was falsely labeled a ‘raaacist!’ ‘”

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“I’m a Christian…not a racist,” he also proclaimed.

“There is an anti-White agenda,” Schriver has also said, according to The Daily Beast. He said there is also a “racist plan to replace Whites with non-Whites through illegal immigration to irreversibly warp America’s demographics, voting citizens, and national identity to keep power in the hands of a godless regime.”

Schriver’s voting record was also covered by The Daily Beast, which reported the far-right Republican has “voted against legislation banning child marriage; prohibiting sexual contact under the pretext of medical treatment; designating Juneteenth as a state holiday; and making race-based discrimination based on someone’s hair texture or style illegal.”

Last year, Schriver called President Abraham Lincoln one of the “architects of the U.S. Constitution.”

READ MORE: Why the Hunter Biden Pardon Is ‘Justified’ According to Legal Experts

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

The Biden White House, under fire from the right and some on the left for the President’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, after having declared he would not do so, revealed on Monday the circumstances that led to the announcement Sunday evening.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday as President Joe Biden travels to Angola, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre suggested if Vice President Kamala Harris had won the November election, President Biden would not have pardoned Hunter Biden—before declaring she did not want to get into hypotheticals. She also said that Biden’s son “was singled out,” and “they tried to break his son in order to break him.”

“In a good faith way, if you are looking at the facts of Hunter’s cases,” Jean-Pierre said (video below), “you can’t reach any other conclusion, right?”

“What we have seen, not just us, there’s other people who have commented on the president’s actions,” she added, “and can see that Hunter was singled out, and, because his last name was Biden, because he was the president’s son. That’s what we saw. And so the president believed, enough is enough, and the president took action, and he also believes, that they tried to break his son in order to break him.”

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“Do you think this would have happened if Harris hadn’t lost the election?” ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett asked, according to a transcript posted by CNN’s DJ Judd.

“I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna get into, into the election. It is a no-l can answer that, it’s a no, and what I can say—” Jean-Pirerre replied.

“It’s a no? This would not have happened if Harris hadn’t lost the election? A pardon would not have happened if Harris hadn’t lost the election?” Haslett pressed.

“I can speak to where we are today,” Jean-Pierre explained, “and so I can’t speak to hypotheticals here. Where we are today, the President made this decision over the weekend. He thought about it, he wrestled with it, and for him, he made this decision because he believed his son was being politically–”

“We’re wondering what changed his mind, and obviously the election– in the statement, he refers to, ‘Enough is enough, he thinks that there could be further- it sounds like he thinks there could be further prosecution of Hunter under a Trump administration,” Haslett continued.

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“He didn’t believe that they would let up, right?” Jean-Pierre replied, apparently referring to prosecutors nominated by the incoming Trump administration, who have said they would go after Hunter Biden and many others seen as enemies of Donald Trump. “He didn’t think that they would, they would continue to go after his son. That’s what he believed. And look, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals, to the original part of your question. The President wrestled with this decision. He made this decision this weekend, and he decided to move forward with pardoning his son.”

“Two things can be true,” Jean-Pierre added, according to The Washington Post’s Matt Viser. “The President does believe in the justice system and the Department of Justice. And he also believes that his son was singled out politically.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says President Joe Biden believed “enough was enough” in coming to the decision Sunday to pardon his son Hunter after months of saying he would not do so.

More: https://t.co/5cQpjGMnIl pic.twitter.com/1NOLOeJMg7

— NewsNation (@NewsNation) December 2, 2024

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Image via Reuters