Is our prospective elite liberal lawyers learning?

The Times story on the Dobbs leak — which, as Paul says, isn’t really important in itself — is interesting because it’s an indication that the Cult of the Court is finally fading for some of the liberals who would be expected to be core members.

Inside the court, justices are treated with such day-to-day deference that junior aides assist them in putting on their black robes. As staff members were grilled, some grew concerned about the fairness of the inquiry, worried that the nine most powerful people at the court were not being questioned rigorously like everyone else.

[…]

First, although the Court rushed out a statement that the justices had been a part of the invesitgation — allowing the Court’s apologists to claim that there was no double standard — in fact the justices were not seriously investigated, and those subject to serious interrogation on the part of the Court’s imperious masters resented it:

A day later, the court was forced to issue a second statement saying that the marshal had in fact conferred with the justices, but on very different terms from others at the institution. Lower-level employees had been formally interrogated, recorded, pressed to sign affidavits denying any involvement and warned that they could lose their jobs if they failed to answer questions fully, according to interviews and the report.

In contrast, conversations with the justices had been a two-way “iterative process” in which they asked as well as answered questions, the marshal, Gail A. Curley, wrote. She had seen no need for them to sign affidavits, she said.

Instead of putting the matter to rest, Friday’s statement heightened concerns about a double standard for justices.

“They weren’t subjected to the same level of scrutiny,” said one court worker on Friday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the court’s confidentiality rules. “It’s hard to imagine any of them suffering meaningful consequences even if they were implicated in the leak.”

The leak is not a big deal; the problem is the justices it treating like a Historic Breach of the Sacred Integrity of the Institution unless one of them did it.

The larger issue here is liberal clerks finding it increasingly hard to take the Republican judges giving stern lectures about how the Court can have nothing to do with politics while they spend their leisure time giving highly partisan speeches at the Mitch McConnell Institute of Forcing Women to Carry Pregnancies to Term and Crushing Labor Under the Lovely Steel Boot of Capital:

Periodically, employees receive a stern memo reminding them that they may not participate in partisan political activities — no events, fund-raising, bumper stickers or statements on social media. So some bristled when four justices attended a 40th-anniversary dinner for the Federalist Society, an influential conservative group that focuses on the judiciary, in November.

Last spring, Justice Thomas declined to recuse himself from cases involving attempts to overthrow the 2020 election, even though Virginia Thomas, his wife, had been involved in those efforts. Months later, a former leader of the anti-abortion movement wrote to the chief justice to report an alleged earlier breach, of a 2014 contraception decision, that he said stemmed from a donor’s meal with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his wife. The court never responded.

How could I go to school after that and pledge allegiance to the flag and sit through good government bullshit?