Dear Editor:
Justice Robert Jackson once wrote, in Brown v. Allen, "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final." This week, the U.S. Supreme Court proved Justice Jackson's point and demonstrated that the court has forgotten as much about statutory construction as it has invented constitutional protections.
In King v. Burwell, the court ignored the long established principle that, whatever a legislature "intended," what counts is what it "wrote."
Appeals to the "entire document" only apply when the plain language is not clear. Justice Scalia went to the heart of the matter when he wrote in King, "[the supreme court] has no free-floating power to rescue Congress from its drafting errors."
In the same week, the court concluded, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that the 14th amendment, drafted to ensure equality between the races, somehow makes men marrying men and women marrying women "equal" to men and women marrying one another.
I suppose that if the court can so glibly ignore traditional rules of statutory construction it can likewise conclude that the drafters of the 14th amendment intended to allow men to marry men and women to marry women. The supreme court has clearly become a "court of popular opinion."
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