Everyone holds a grudge against some product so poor it’s unusable. The pan to which everything sticks; the deodorant that transforms the smell of sweat into a chemical weapon; the vile beer you haven’t raised to your lips since you were 19; much of the Disney Star Wars catalog.
CNN’s coverage of the Supreme Court is similarly dismal.
There are exceptions that ought to be acknowledged up front. Chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid traffics mostly in straightforward summaries and scoops, and senior legal analyst Elie Honig is among the most evenhanded and able in the entire industry (his takedown of disgraced Manhattan District Attorney and unwitting Trump 2024 campaign co-chair Alvin Bragg made for a particularly enjoyable and richly deserved demonstration of his fair-minded aptitude.)
But by and large: dismal.
Tuesday was particularly instructive. The Supreme Court released a pair of decisions celebrated by conservatives on the topics of campaign finance and transgender athletes before striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to do away with birthright citizenship in its most highly anticipated opinion of the term.
It was a representative finale, as the Court has spent months serving up mixed bags that have driven the president to his wit’s end. Among the other subjects he’s suffered losses on: tariffs, mail-in ballot deadlines, and the employment status of Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.
Nevertheless, a panel on Tuesday’s edition of Inside Politics breaking down this final spate of cases appears to have been assembled for the express purpose of advancing a preposterous narrative about the Court’s supposed partisan bent.
After The New York Times’ Tyler Pager observed that Trump was likely to lash out over the birthright citizenship ruling, host Manu Raju insisted that the Court “did allow him to push the bounds of what he can do.”
Moments later, the discussion turned to National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the aforementioned campaign finance case in which the Court held that the congressionally-imposed limits on the amount of money that can be spent by political parties in coordination with candidates violate the First Amendment – and devolved into a stunning demonstration of its participants’ juvenile hackery.
Raju characterized it as “a big win for Republicans, who were pushing to gut the post-Watergate rules.” You get all that? Republicans are desperate, to the point of violent metaphors to bring back Watergate-style corruption. Never mind the facts of the actual case, which had nothing to do with the scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office, or that the ruling cuts both ways. Just take CNN at its word.
It only got worse from there. NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe complained that while “people” want to see money taken “out of politics,” the Court has moved “in the totally opposite direction.” As a liberal, her misunderstanding of the American constitutional order – the judiciary is designed to be a check on the political branches, not a super-legislature that rubber stamps the whims of the “people” at any given point in time – is to be expected. As a professional political commentator, it’s embarrassing.
Not to be outdone, Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck marveled that “this Supreme Court” is “unapologetic” about “overruling its own precedent,” and parroted Justice Elena Kagan’s protest that “we’re supposed to have good reasons for overturning these precedents” before repeating Rascoe’s inane point about public sentiment. Arbitrary, undue restrictions on political speech don’t qualify as a “good reason” in Vladeck’s book? Spare a prayer for this man’s poor students. They’re paying over $80,000 a year in tuition to be misinformed by a slack-jawed blowhard.
Chief Supreme Court analyst and Fredo Corleone of Nina Totenberg’s Joan Biskupic picked up the torch from there to gush over Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the trans athlete case, in which she argued: “how terrible it was going to be in terms of fairness on the competitive field.”
Huh?
She went on to declare that interpersonal tension between the justices could be chalked up to the fact that “the conservative members of the Court were chosen for certain reasons, and they were chosen for their vigilance on the kinds of rulings that-”
“And their reliability,” chimed in Vladeck.
“-not just President Trump might want, but the Republican Party would want. That was the whole point,” concluded Biskupic.
“Well, the word reliability, I think, is an important one because it’s exactly why the Court is constantly criticized. Because overturning precedent is not just a matter of throwing away trash,” declared chief legal analyst Laura Coates. “ It really is if the American public has chosen these nine Supreme Court justices in terms of a body that is supposed to provide the consistency, reliability so people can manage their lives accordingly, every time you overturn precedent, you undermine the ability of the American public, let alone the voting public, to understand the world in which they live and operate, and the balance of power. And so if they are in the business of deciding what we just said no longer applies, then how can the American public be in the habit of understanding what laws and rights they retain, and what will end up on the fire heap.”
What you’re not supposed to notice is that it’s the conservative majority that just rescued one of the public’s most cherished rights from the fire heap.
Or that the progressive chattering class only extolls the sacred value of stare decisis when it serves their political interests.
At the root of this parade of misfires, distortions, and outright lies — all of which were promulgated in only about 15 minutes of airtime — is the fact that it’s the Left that approaches legal questions in exactly the shameful manner that it pretends the Right does.
It’s the Democratic appointees to the bench who vote as a bloc on every single high-profile, politically sensitive case. It’s they who were appointed to promote a worldview rather than uphold the law. And it’s their cheerleaders in liberal media who have worked tirelessly to delegitimize Article III in the eyes of the public.
The cost of that campaign? Its participants’ dignity and professional pride.
They’re all too happy to pay up.
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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.