Thursday, August 06, 2020

Mike Pence upset that Justice John Roberts isn't trying to be a completely biased right-wing judge

VP and hypocrite Mike Pence
What can you do when you and your party devote a considerable amount of time, effort, and money to put people the Supreme Court who will rule the way you want just to have your plans go up in smoke because one of your designated picks refuses to play ball?

If you're VP Mike Pence, you have a biased interview with a religious right hack to complain about it.

From Politico:

Vice President Mike Pence described Chief Justice John Roberts as a “disappointment” to conservative voters, explicitly seeking to cast the Supreme Court as a campaign issue ahead of the November election. 
“Look, we have great respect for the institution of the Supreme Court of the United States,” Pence told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody on Wednesday. “But Chief Justice John Roberts has been a disappointment to conservatives — whether it be the Obamacare decision, or whether it be a spate of recent decisions all the way through Calvary Chapel.” 
The vice president’s criticism of the chief justice’s jurisprudence comes after Roberts sided with the high court’s Democratic appointees on several occasions in recent months, dealing the Trump administration defeats on issues including LGBT workplace discrimination, immigration and abortion. 

According to USA Today:

 The vice president pointed to Roberts' 2012 vote upholding the Affordable Care Act and "a spate of recent decisions," including the Calvary Chapel case last month, a 5-4 ruling that went against a church seeking exemptions from Nevada's coronavirus restrictions. 

Those other decisions, by way of CNN, included:

.  . . the Supreme Court's decision in June to strike down a controversial Louisiana abortion law that critics said would have closed nearly every clinic in the state. Roberts delivered a fifth vote to the liberals -- the first time the chief justice had voted against an abortion restriction.

. . . Roberts also sided with an opinion that extended anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ workers and upheld the program allowing undocumented immigrants who came into the US as children to remain.

This post is not to crown Roberts a bastion of liberalism on the bench. He has made some rulings which I don't agree with, such as a dismal ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

 The point is it should bother more people that Pence expected a SCOTUS judge to be biased and is loudly expressing his disappointment that said judge isn't biased. Aren't justices supposed to be impartial?   Even before Trump came on the scene, Pence has more than once demonstrated himself to be an overzealous religious hypocrite.

I guess now that Trump is in office, he's trying to go all extra.

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