SUPREME DISCONTENT

I confess to ignorance about the law, but I do have an ounce or two of common sense and it seems to me that common sense would not be out of place in the legal world. This said, I noted with some bemusement the US Supreme Court's 5 - 4 decision that it's right and proper for police and jail authorities to strip search even those brought in for the slightest offense--and even when those offenders prove to have been wrongly apprehended. This was the case before the court: a man brought in for an unpaid fine that had actually been paid long before. Instead of the apology he was due, he was rewarded with a humiliating strip search--on two separate occasions--and kept in jail for six days. The Supreme Court justices, in their wisdom, ruled that such searches are legal no matter how trivial the reason for the arrest.

Like many of my fellow liberals, I have been dismayed by many of the Supreme Court's actions in the past. From my point of view, in the only most egregious example, the Bush v. Gore decision gave us a president who led us down a path not only into a disastrous and unnecessary war but also into fiscal disaster by the end of his term. And let's not even talk about Citizens United. I am dreading the announcement of their decision on the health care law. I can't escape the judgment that the five conservative members are guided by political rather than legal considerations. As Maureen Dowd wrote in her rightly devasating New York Times column yesterday: "[The Court] has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes."

It's ironic that these same people and those who supported their appointment were precisely those who fulminated against an "activist" judiciary.

The court reflects this country's increasingly partisan divisions and the rejection of what seems to me no more than common sense in favor of impassioned prejudice. Unelected and seated as they are, for lifetime terms, the justices owe it to the country to limit themselves to the consideration of, precisely, questions of justice, and keep their noses out of policy and politics.