The U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority seems intent on strangling the life out of the Constitution to give Donald Trump authoritarian powers, according to a state Supreme Court justice.
Hawaii Supreme Court justice Todd Eddins has been an outspoken critic of the nation's top court, which he said had abandoned legal precedent to impose their personal preferences and political theories to decide cases, and he told Slate columnists Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern that these decisions put democracy at risk.
"You know, when precedent is for suckers and we don’t know whether settled law will become unsettled every June, it’s really hard for the judiciary to function," Eddins said. "It’s hard for judges to operate when there’s a lack of stability. And it’s not just judges; it’s the litigants, the lawyers, the law professors who have to tear up their syllabuses. I mean, it’s fundamental to our American system of justice that law works incrementally, that cases build upon cases, and that we rely on precedent. That’s the stability of the law. And when you have a group of people who come in and disregard precedent, it really unsettles things; it causes chaos. People don’t know how to operate."
The right-wing majority shaped by Trump purportedly bases their decisions on the originalist legal philosophy that considers the founders' intentions, but Eddins said their reasoning frequently landed on outdated judgments from a racist, misogynistic, homophobic society and limited the judgments of contemporary judges.
"I think it’s also a lack of humility, a lack of respect for all the law that’s been out there for centuries of the American judicial system," Eddins said. "Who gave these originalists the right to kill the Constitution? And when the Constitution is killed, where do we stand? It makes it so difficult for courts throughout the land."
Conservatives have fought for years to restrict states in their authority to protect voting rights and elevating one individual above all others in the eyes of the law, Eddins said.
"The U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions are really destroying democracy," Eddins said. "It’s just race to the extreme in case after case. It tears at the fabric of our nation and what I view our federal Constitution to be. And now, over the last few weeks, it seems like it’s not just personal values and preferences that they’re injecting into their jurisprudence; they also give preference to specific individuals, and that’s where the court is truly eroding confidence in the judicial system."
The justice was asked whether the specific individual he was thinking of was Trump in his presidential immunity case.
"I am," Eddins replied.
