Will Politics Tarnish the Supreme Courts Legitimacy? by Linda Greenhouse
'There’s been a flood of hand-wringing and tut-tutting over some observations that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. offered during the argument earlier this month in the big Wisconsin gerrymander case. He dismissed as “sociological gobbledygook” the metrics the plaintiffs offered for determining when districting decisions cross the line from ordinary politics to blunt force. He warned that the court would be putting its legitimacy in the eyes of the public on the line if it became the state-by-state arbiter of partisanship gone too far.
“Gobbledygook” has received the most attention, some playful and some fairly snarky. A public letter addressed to the chief justice from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, president of the American Sociological Association, was somewhere in between (with a dose of academic self-importance for good measure). He offered to “put together a group of nationally and internationally renowned sociologists to meet with you and your staff,” adding that “given the important ways in which sociological data can and have informed thoughtful decision-making from the bench, such time would be well spent.” Doubtless.
My interest is not in the chief justice’s flippant remark, but in his serious one. He was addressing Paul M. Smith, the lawyer for the Wisconsin Democrats who, in the lower court, successfully challenged a Republican-drawn state Assembly map that gave Republicans 60 out of the 99 seats although the party drew only 48.6 percent of the statewide vote. (By a 5 to 4 vote in June, the justices granted Wisconsin a stay of the lower court’s decision striking down the redistricting map, to last until the Supreme Court itself decides the case, Gill v. Whitford. Dissenting from the stay were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.) The chief justice observed to Mr. Smith that if the plaintiffs prevailed, “there will naturally be a lot of these claims raised around the country.”
He went on: “We will have to decide in every case whether the Democrats win or the Republicans win. So it’s going to be a problem here across the board. And if you’re the intelligent man on the street and the court issues a decision, and let’s say the Democrats win, and that person will say: ‘Well, why did the Democrats win?’ ”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/opinion/politics-supreme-court-legitimacy.html?
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