If Justice Sammy the Hammer judges by feelings rather than principles, the truth is that so does Justice Nino

Justice Sammy the Hammer (left) and Justice Nino (right) with some other guy in the middle (he looks like trouble too, wouldn't you say?)

"All the pieces of Alito’s record fit together. As a prosecutor, a federal-appeals judge and now as a Supreme Court justice, Alito is defined not by his broad ideas but by his consistency. Instead of the pizzazz of Scalia or the polish of Roberts, Alito makes his mark by getting to the outcomes conservatives favor with whatever tool is at hand and with even more predictability."

-- Slate's Emily Bazelon, in a Sunday NYT Magazine piece
about Justice Sammy the Hammer, "Mysterious Justice"

"While the jurisprudence of this court has sometimes sanctioned a ‘living Constitution,’ it has never approved a living United States Code.”

-- Justice Nino, cracking wise in his dissenting opinion
in Kaste v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp.

by Ken

Okay, we could be talking once again about the right-wing thugs now having their way on the Supreme Court. For forever now -- well, a good day or two, at least, but it's felt like forever as I contemplated having to write about these yobbos again -- I've been wanting to write about Emily Bazelon's NYT Mag piece about Sammy the Hammer. She's been trying to puzzle the guy out since he took his place on the Court, and finally thinks she's got him. Unlike the grandiose theorists of the Court's Far Right, who claim to be guided by elaborate systems of legal and judicial philosophy, the Hammer just grinds 'em out a case at a time, and yet, as if by magic, manages, in all the cases that matter, to arrive at the same result!

While I've been pondering writing about the Hammer, and Emily's interesting notion of what he thinks he's doing, we've had this interesting case, where the Court ruled 6-2 (Justice Kagan not participating) that when it comes to a legal requirement to file an employment complaint, at least in this particular case, Kaste v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., contrary to lower-court rulings, a properly made oral complaint can qualify.

The only dissenters in this exceedingly minor case were Justice Nino and his guy Justice Clarence. It was an unimportant enough case that the chief justice and the Hammer had a free pass to show that contrary to all those scurrilous rumors, they don't absolutely always vote against little guys. Noted, guys. And in his stinging defense, Justice Nino aimed the above-cited jab, which I cite just to show what a silly billy our Nino can be. He loves to make this grand pronouncements, but the reality is that he has no legal or judicial philosophy except whatever philosophy you could construct out of his cast-iron prejudices and preconceptions. By now isn't it clear that that's what he uses to make up his mind on cases? It probably takes him less than a second. And then he dresses it all up with his fancy-sounding legal mumbo-jumbo.

Whereas Emily Bazelon's piece has me more or less persuaded that the Hammer may truly believe he's standing up for the little guy. She points out the abundant irony that after all the fuss about "empathy" as a forbidden quality for justices, at least when they're of the left-of-center persuasion, our Sammy is all empathy. His opinions reek of it. But then, didn't he make that clear in his confirmation hearings? It's just that it didn't offend the right-wingers.

The only thing is that, as Emily points out, his empathy is reserved exclusively for people exactly like himself, or at least his self as he perceives it: pulled-up-by-your-own-bootstraps types. And again, as Emily points out, by miraculous chance he can be counted on to line up with the great legal philosophers Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.

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