{"id":594,"date":"2026-07-03T11:06:59","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T11:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=594"},"modified":"2026-07-03T11:06:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T11:06:59","slug":"the-supreme-court-can-no-longer-explain-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court can no longer explain itself"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The legal profession is much like a priesthood; both lawyers and theologians interpret a central text, be it the Bible, the Quran, the Gita, or the Constitution. We bury ourselves in canonical commentaries on that text. And we are all supplicants to beings much more powerful than ourselves.<\/p>\n

Read more The fatal flaw in how America handles heat waves<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Which explains why I\u2019ve spent the past few years contemplating what happens when God goes mad.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Supreme Court wrapped up its most recent term during a bizarrely haphazard celebration of the United States\u2019 250th birthday. And it has struggled to articulate a coherent vision of the Constitution no less than President Donald Trump has struggled to keep the National Mall\u2019s reflecting pool clear during that celebration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Court isn\u2019t just the most powerful institution in the United States \u2014 the only body capable of overriding both Congress and the president. It is supposed to be the caretaker of something sacred and eternal. As Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, the whole purpose of a written constitution is \u201cto prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That is, the Constitution fixes in place certain rights and governmental structures that are not supposed to change just because someone loses an election or because a few seats on the Supreme Court change hands. The right to free speech, the rule establishing that people born in the US are Americans, and the idea that all Americans, including the president, are subject to the same laws are abiding principles that should survive a change in administration or in the Court\u2019s makeup.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But this Court does not simply overrule foundational precedents so often it is difficult keep ; its work is increasingly illegible to people \u2014 even lawyers \u2014 who do not share the Republican justices\u2019 values. I am grateful that I no longer practice law, because one of a lawyer\u2019s primary duties is to advise clients on whether something they plan to do in the future is legal. And this Court\u2019s interpretations of the law are often too opaque and unpredictable to allow lawyers to advise clients on what the law will be tomorrow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the most prestigious writing assignments in the American legal academy is the Harvard Law Review\u2019s annual Foreword. Last year, this assignment went to Richard Re, an insightful right-leaning scholar on Harvard\u2019s own faculty, and Re spent much of his Foreword discussing why \u201c\u201d have diverged.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Re writes that, for many years, the Court was dominated by \u201cswing\u201d justices like Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O\u2019Connor, and Anthony Kennedy who were \u201cRepublican appointees selected under conditions that facilitated the identification of moderates.\u201d These justices were all moderate conservatives who weren\u2019t particularly sympathetic to liberal causes, but they also tended to shy away from decisions that would alienate half of the country. As Re writes, Powell, O\u2019Connor, and Kennedy had a knack for avoiding \u201cresults that would divide the nation and threaten the Court\u2019s legitimacy or popularity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Just as importantly, these swing justices forced \u201cjudges, advocates, commentators, and students\u201d to all seek \u201cways of appealing to those median jurists.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because a moderate justice \u201cheld the key to major victories,\u201d lawyers and judges across the political spectrum had to ask themselves \u201cwhat would Anthony Kennedy do?\u201d and not \u201cwhat outcome would I prefer?\u201d In Re\u2019s words, this \u201cshared mission effectively forced the two opposed ideological groups to adopt a common language and mode of reasoning, at least when arguing their cases.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Today, by contrast, the Court is dominated by a coalition made up of two camps: very conservative Republicans and fiendishly conservative Republicans. Republican legal elites spend their time crafting legal theories that sound fantastical or even farcical to lawyers who do not belong to their tribe. And when the Supreme Court embraces these theories, they are often impenetrable even to other federal judges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This legal divide is, of course, symptomatic of a greater rot. Democrats and Republicans are as polarized in Congress and in the broader electorate as they are in the Supreme Court. Consumers divide over whether to buy the liberal brand of blue jeans, coffee, or beer or the nearly identical MAGA version. America is so divided it can\u2019t even celebrate its 250th birthday. As I write these words, the nearly empty Great American State Fair is eclipsed by our head of state\u2019s hyperfixation on an algae bloom and his broader desire to turn our semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the country does pay a significant price for its bifurcated legal priesthood, above and beyond the broader costs political polarization imposes on us all. The decisions handed down by one faction of this priesthood are increasingly incomprehensible to people outside that faction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a result, lawyers cannot reliably advise their clients when the law is constantly shifting and incomprehensible to many of them, and lawmakers cannot know in advance whether the bill they spend years shepherding into law will be struck down by the courts. And ordinary Americans, who may rely on their attorneys for counsel and who relied on lawmakers\u2019 promises that they could actually legislate, can easily lose faith in a system that even lawyers cannot understand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Meanwhile, the biggest loser may be the Court itself. When the legal priesthood\u2019s nine prelates are unable to explain their decisions in ways lawyers can understand \u2014 when the high priests refuse to tell us why they decided cases the way they did or seem to abandon their longstanding beliefs once those beliefs inconvenience their political party \u2014 those decisions become fragile. A few shifts in the Court\u2019s makeup could bring even more disruption, as the new guard casts aside decisions they find repulsive or that they simply cannot comprehend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the worst case scenario for this Court, Democratic lawmakers who believe that the justices have weaponized the law against them could retaliate in ways that the Court cannot defend itself against.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Alitoification of Brett Kavanaugh<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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One apparent consequence of a polarized legal priesthood is that justices who previously displayed hints of moderation are being pulled deeper into their respective camps \u2014 a shift that is embodied by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the early years, when Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were still newly installed on the Court, legal commentators often spoke of a \u201c3-3-3 Supreme Court.\u201d The three Democrats formed one bloc; Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch formed a far right bloc; and Chief Justice John Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett broke with the MAGA justices often enough that they appeared to be collectively more cautious than Thomas or Alito.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1st Amendment cases, Kavanaugh joined a six-justice coalition that voted to preserve free speech rights that the most reactionary justices wish to abolish. Kavanaugh ruled that the military, under then\u2013Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden, could require service members to be vaccinated against Covid-19. And he joined the Court\u2019s short-lived decision in (2023), which required Alabama to redraw its congressional maps to include an additional Black-majority district.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Not long after President Donald Trump\u2019s reelection, however, Kavanaugh started acting much like his most partisan colleague, Justice Alito. Shortly before the recent term began, Kavanaugh authored his infamous \u201c\u201d opinion, which argued that a person\u2019s ethnicity is a \u201crelevant factor\u201d that law enforcement may consider when deciding whom to stop, and which also claimed that ICE operations targeting US citizens and lawful residents are a minor imposition that are \u201ctypically brief\u201d \u2014 words he wrote just a few months before immigration officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While three of Kavanaugh\u2019s Republican colleagues voted to strike down many of Trump\u2019s tariffs, Kavanaugh did not. Kavanaugh also voted to throw out thousands of absentee ballots after the Republican Party asked him to, rejecting a majority opinion by Barrett that devastated the GOP\u2019s legal arguments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And Kavanaugh even claimed that the Constitution no longer guarantees that nearly everyone born in this country is a US citizen \u2014 a provision that was written into the 14th Amendment in 1868 \u2014 because \u201csignificant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868.\u201d (Unlike three of Kavanaugh\u2019s fellow Republicans, he did say that a federal statute protects birthright citizenship, even as he tried to rewrite the Constitution.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kavanaugh\u2019s conclusion doesn\u2019t just defy the text of the Constitution itself; it also defies Scalia\u2019s principle that constitutional meaning is fixed \u2014 a principle that has animated Republican judges\u2019 approach to constitutional interpretation for at least a generation. Republicans inspired by Scalia have spent decades railing against the \u201cliving constitution,\u201d the idea that constitutional meaning changes with society. Anyone who has paid attention to how Republicans read the Constitution would have thought that living constitutionalism died years ago. But, apparently, living constitutionalism is good now, so long as it aligns with the Republican Party\u2019s shifting values.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s not entirely clear why Kavanaugh made this shift and decided to emulate Alito. It\u2019s entirely possible that he will resume his alliance with Roberts and Barrett once a different mix of cases reach the Court. But that uncertainty about Kavanaugh\u2019s future behavior only adds to the illegibility of this Court.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Republican justices also abandoned the moral high ground on Roe v. Wade<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Another legal concept that Republicans opposed until very recently is substantive due process: the idea that two provisions of the Constitution that prohibit the government from denying people \u201cliberty\u201d without \u201cdue process of law\u201d create individual rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Substantive due process was used by economic libertarians in the early 20th century to strike down a wide range of workplace regulations, including the minimum wage, the right to unionize, and a law limiting bakery workers to 60-hour work weeks. Substantive due process also played a starring role in Roe v. Wade<\/em> (1973), the Court\u2019s now-overruled decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. (The idea was that the right to abortion is such an essential \u201cliberty\u201d that no amount of \u201cprocess\u201d could justify taking it away.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many of the Republican justices have embraced the traditional arguments against substantive due process in their past opinions. Thomas, for example, called it a \u201cdangerous fiction\u201d that \u201cinvites judges to \u2026 \u201c\u2018roa[m] at large in the constitutional field\u2019 guided only by their personal views.\u201d Gorsuch railed against \u201cjudicial misuse\u201d of substantive due process \u201cto dictate policy on matters that belonged to the people to decide.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But now that Roe <\/em>is gone, and Republicans firmly control the Supreme Court, they\u2019ve decided that giving judges free rein to dictate policy based solely on their personal views is a good idea.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In (2026), the Court used substantive due process to declare that public school teachers have a constitutional duty to out transgender students to their parents, with all three Democratic justices dissenting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The opinion was very short, and it was a temporary decision handed down on the Court\u2019s \u201cshadow docket,\u201d so it is possible that the justices will revisit this issue. But, for now, the Court appears to believe that judges can dictate policy on sensitive questions like whether a high school student can trust his teacher with a secret that the student isn\u2019t ready to share with their parents. The idea that substantive due process is a \u201cdangerous fiction\u201d is suddenly no longer on most of the justices\u2019 minds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, the fact that the Court now often hands down brief or unexplained decisions on its shadow docket, a mix of emergency motions and other matters the justices decide on an expedited basis, is another reason why this Court is often illegible to outside observers. Before Trump became president, the Court rarely handed down shadow docket decisions, and it typically provided lengthy explanations for any matter it decided.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But, in the absence of an opinion fully explaining why schoolteachers must out trans students, lawyers and lower court judges can do little more than guess which other policies this Court will dictate while it is roaming at large in the constitutional field.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Supreme Court\u2019s 2nd Amendment decisions are illegible even to other federal judges<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Perhaps the most illegible of the Roberts Court\u2019s major decisions is (2022), which governs Second Amendment disputes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bruen<\/em> requires judges hearing these cases to ask whether the modern-day gun law that is being challenged in court is \u201crelevantly similar\u201d to a law that existed when the Constitution was written. While the Court has struggled to explain how similar the two laws must be, Bruen<\/em> did suggest that modern gun laws are especially unlikely to survive if they address \u201ca general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This novel legal test confounded judges. In a , Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions, some of them written by Trump appointees, which complained that judges cannot figure out how Bruen<\/em> is supposed to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bruen<\/em> also led to absurd results right out the gate. That\u2019s because one example of a general society problem that has persisted since the 18th century is violence between romantic partners \u2014 and the law generally ignored this problem until the late nineteenth century. In all 50 states, it was legal for married partners to beat their spouses until 1871, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that husbands and wives \u201cmay be indicted for assault and battery upon each other.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And so, just months after Bruen<\/em>, a federal appeals court struck down the federal law that bars from possessing a gun.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When this case, known as (2024), reached the Supreme Court, the justices seemed to back away from Bruen<\/em>. Though Rahimi<\/em> did not abandon Bruen<\/em>\u2019s unusual test, it pointed to founding era laws that have nothing to do with firearms \u2014 laws that sometimes required \u201cindividuals suspected of future misbehavior to post a bond\u201d that they would forfeit if they \u201cbroke the peace\u201d \u2014 and deemed this law to be similar enough to the modern day domestic abuser law to survive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This term, however, the Court heard a challenge to a much more sweeping Hawaii law that required gun owners to get permission from a business\u2019s owner or manager before they could bring a gun on that business\u2019s property. The Hawaii law was drafted this way because four states had nearly identical laws in the 1700s that, in the words of Pennsylvania\u2019s statute, made it illegal to \u201ccarry any gun or hunt on the improved or inclosed lands of any plantation, other than his own,\u201d without securing \u201clicense or permission from the owner of such lands or plantation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet, in (2026), the Republican justices concluded that these nearly identical 18th century laws were not sufficiently similar to Hawaii\u2019s law because, Alito claimed in his majority opinion, the old laws were primarily concerned with preventing poaching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a policy matter, it\u2019s easy to see why these two cases came down the way they did. Rahimi<\/em> involved a narrow law targeting dangerous individuals who had already received a court hearing. The law at issue in Wolford, <\/em>by contrast, would have effectively banned guns in nearly every public place in Hawaii \u2014 because few gun owners are going to enter a business unarmed, find the manager, obtain permission to carry, and then return with their weapon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there\u2019s no legal basis for these two outcomes, at least so long as Bruen<\/em> is good law. The old laws at issue in Wolford<\/em> are obviously more similar to Hawaii\u2019s law than the old laws at issue in Rahimi<\/em> were to the ban on gun ownership by domestic abusers. Bruen<\/em> is unserious. And its legal standard is incomprehensible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u2019s a difference between an illegible Supreme Court decision, and one that is merely wrong<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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There are many other recent decisions that are poorly explained, inconsistently applied, or otherwise illegible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Court, for example, has never explained where its \u201cmajor questions doctrine,\u201d a newly minted theory that it used to block several actions by the Biden administration, actually comes from. It has also never used this doctrine, which , against any president who isn\u2019t named \u201cJoe Biden\u201d \u2014 although the Court\u2019s six Republicans did split 3-3 on whether to apply it to a Republican president in (2026), the tariffs case.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Similarly, in (2025), the Republican justices appeared to create a special carveout to its rules governing which federal laws may be enforced in court in order to ensure that an abortion provider did not prevail in that case. This term, when the Court was confronted with a similar legal issue in a case that did not<\/em> involve abortion, the justices did not even cite Medina<\/em>, much less explain why their special rule did not apply to the new case.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the same time, not every recent Supreme Court decision that involves a politically charged issue, or that divides the Court along partisan lines, can fairly be critiqued as illegible. This includes transformative decisions like (2026), which effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that required some states to draw a minimum number of legislative districts that would elect non-white lawmakers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Callais<\/em> was rooted in a concept called the \u201c\u201d that should be familiar to any law student who has passed their first semester of Constitutional Law. Colorblindness is the idea that laws that seek to create a racial underclass, such as Jim Crow laws, are morally and legally identical to affirmative action and similar programs that offer a benefit to racial groups that have historically been subject to discrimination. And this idea has been a mainstay of conservative judicial opinions involving racial issues for decades. Chief Justice Roberts summarized the colorblind theory of the Constitution nearly twenty years ago in a pithy line: \u201cThe way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Similarly, (2026), the Court\u2019s latest decision striking down a campaign finance law, is grounded in the Republican Party\u2019s longstanding belief that nearly all regulations of money in politics violate the First Amendment \u2014 a position that justices in both majority and dissenting opinions have advanced for decades. (2026), which gave Trump the power to fire nearly all leaders of \u201cindependent\u201d federal agencies, also has a longstanding pedigree; the decision implemented a dissenting opinion that Scalia wrote in 1988.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whatever else can be said about Callais<\/em>, NRSC<\/em>, or Slaughter<\/em>, in other words, they were all rooted in ideas that have been part of legal debates for generations and that have been part of many law schools\u2019 mandatory coursework for decades. Competent lawyers know how to advise clients on campaign finance law, even if they disagree with NRSC<\/em>. Law professors know how to teach the concept of colorblindness, even if they think this idea is wrong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That distinguishes these cases from decisions like Bruen<\/em>, which require lawyers and judges to play an elaborate game of \u201cwhy is a raven like a writing desk?\u201d and guess how the justices will answer this unfathomable question.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It is normal for whichever political faction controls the Supreme Court to implement controversial ideas that have long been endorsed by that faction. The current Court isn\u2019t abnormal because it is conservative. It is abnormal because it frequently cannot articulate the basis of its decisions. It invents incomprehensible legal rules. It baffles judges. And, especially in its shadow docket decisions, this Court often provides no explanation whatsoever for transformative legal rulings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Court\u2019s inability to explain itself makes it weak<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Right now, as the justices pack up their chambers and get ready for their summer vacations, President Trump is preparing to give a long, droning speech to what has thus far been a barren celebration of America\u2019s 250th birthday. It\u2019s a terrible shame, because the semiquincentennial could have been a unifying event that renewed many Americans\u2019 commitment to our nation\u2019s foundational values.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As Justice Gorsuch, of all people, said in a recent interview promoting his latest book, the United States is a \u201ccreedal nation.\u201d We are not united by a single religion, a single ethnicity, or even a common culture. Instead, says Gorsuch, the American nation is defined by three values articulated 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence: \u201call of us are equal,\u201d \u201ceach of us has inalienable rights,\u201d and \u201cwe have the right to rule ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These foundational values are, of course, as much of a myth as the major questions doctrine, or as the idea that the architects of the 14th Amendment \u2014 who also created affirmative action programs like the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau \u2014 believed in a colorblind Constitution. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, wasn\u2019t just a slaveholder; he was the leader of early America\u2019s Southern political faction that sought to preserve slavery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But myths have tremendous power. Gorsuch\u2019s theory of America is largely borrowed from the late historian Gordon Wood, who credited the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln as the first American leader to find in the Declaration \u201ca solution to the great problem of American identity.\u201d Frederick Douglass spoke of the Declaration as the \u201c.\u201d Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Declaration\u2019s three principles a \u201cpromissory note to which every American was to fall heir.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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From the pen of one of America\u2019s most morally compromised early leaders came a narrative that inspired generations of Americans to build the world\u2019s most successful liberal democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Like any other priesthood, lawyers and judges also deal in mythology. The stories we tell about why the Constitution was drafted and what it sought to accomplish are sometimes fabricated, and they frequently rely on a selective reading of American history. But these stories are nonetheless powerful. And, when they are told by five or more justices, even Trump has yielded to them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the current Court\u2019s inability to tell plausible stories has also weakened it considerably, and it\u2019s causing some of the most prominent figures in US politics to question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a 2023 interview, Justice Alito complained that his Court is \u201cbeing hammered daily\u201d by critics of its decisions, and he claimed that lawyers have an obligation to close ranks around him. \u201cThe idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms,\u201d Alito said, \u201cbut if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead, Alito lamented, some lawyers have \u201cparticipated to some degree in these attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Unlike Alito, I do not believe that I gave up my First Amendment right to criticize my own government when I that admitted me to the bar. But even if I wanted to defend this Court\u2019s behavior, I often do not know how.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How am I supposed to explain a shadow docket decision that the Court hasn\u2019t even bothered to explain itself? How do I defend justices who\u2019ve abandoned principles that they\u2019ve advocated for decades, and who, again, did so without explaining why? How can I even articulate an argument in favor of Alito\u2019s position that the Constitution, which has guaranteed citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States for 158 years, suddenly does not?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nor am I the only one who is experiencing this discomfort and who is beginning to question whether this Court should continue to wield the enormous influence it has over hundreds of millions of people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Last May, former Vice President Kamala Harris joined the growing chorus of Democrats arguing that \u201cthe idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court\u201d should be part of an \u201cexpanded playbook\u201d that Democrats might use to defend against a Republican judiciary. Congress may, by enacting a new law, add seats to the Supreme Court that can immediately be filled by the sitting president, although this idea has long been considered too radical for mainstream politicians to consider.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I don\u2019t know which way the winds of politics will blow next. But I do know that, in a world where Donald Trump can become president, many ideas that were once considered far outside the bounds of the possible are now entirely plausible. It\u2019s actually very normal for the United States to elect a Congress and a president that agrees with an idea that was recently articulated by one of the two major parties\u2019 last presidential nominee.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Republican justices, in other words, are playing with fire when they hand down decisions that are illegible to people, including lawyers, who do not share their values. Many of the Court\u2019s recent decisions seem designed to convince Democrats that the justices are acting arbitrarily, and that they are motivated entirely by partisanship. Those justices should not be shocked if the next time Democrats are in power, they do something about it.<\/p>\n

Read more Medicare is now offering $50 GLP-1 prescriptions. The US may never be the same.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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  • Supreme Court<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The justices don\u2019t speak a common language, even with each other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court can no longer explain itself - American Living Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=594\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court can no longer explain itself - American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The justices don\u2019t speak a common language, even with each other.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=594\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-03T11:06:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"21 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=594#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=594\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/7b970e3bc484fe2e26860a4380d70de8\"},\"headline\":\"The Supreme Court can no longer explain itself\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-03T11:06:59+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=594\"},\"wordCount\":4165,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=594#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/f8a52ce86618ac23395888c2aea5d7aa.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=594#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=594\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=594\",\"name\":\"The Supreme Court can no longer explain itself - 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