Priests who lost their faith but kept their jobs

Dalia Lithwick has a cogent summary of the absurdities of the Supreme Court’s non-investigation of its own integritude in re the leak of the Dobbs draft:

The inability to find the leaker is part and parcel of this story. The betrayal is shattering to the Justices, yet they participated in an investigation predicated upon their own unassailable honor, which is unfortunately what remains in question. Maybe it’s no accident that the same Supreme Court that claims to be shattered by the leak of the Dobbs opinion also signed off on an investigation that could only point to a clerk or employee. The investigators showed the same zeal for accountability that has come to characterize the current Supreme Court’s endlessly flouted “ethics” “rules,” and the same commitment to certainty and predictability as its current shape shifting docket. The fiction that the nine Justices are above being policed is paramount—the Justices were questioned in the investigation of the leak, but it was deemed unnecessary to ask them to sign sworn affidavits—and the public is asked to trust they are above suspicion. The leak of the opinion that created a national state of chaos around reproductive rights and bodily autonomy has thus become its own national story of chaos around the court’s procedures, its policies, and its integrity. We are, again, bound by the high court’s indeterminate rules. And they are bound, again, by nothing.

This is certainly true, but I think the solution to this mystery is lying in plain sight. Here is Josh Gerstein in Politico, who broke the original story, reviewing the SCOTUS report on the leak. The first question he asks is, did the investigator interview the Justices themselves? Gerstein knows who leaked the draft! Do you think he might just be giving us a basically unnecessary clue?

But really, at this point who cares anyway? As much as I like Lithwick’s work in general, I have to point out that her traditionally reverential attitude toward the SCOTUS — an attitude or at least a pose shared by elite lawyers throughout the system, from academia through the bar itself — has always been a big part of the problem here.

These aren’t priests of the American civic religion — they’re ordinary government bureaucrats, insulated from all ordinary bureaucratic responsibility by our ridiculous system, which treats Supreme Court justices as some sort of mystical atavism, the Oracles of the Rule of Law, as opposed to what they are, which is nothing but a highly specialized and extraordinarily pretentious species of politician.

The sooner all the pseudo-religious malarkey surrounding them gets demolished, the better.