The Shocking Supreme Court Leak – by Bari Weiss
The Supreme Court was always the most cloistered governmental institution in America the one where wisdom and precedent and reverence for our great constitutional tradition outweighed everything else. If there was something sacred that remained, this was it. Yes, there have been leaks from the Court before. But as Politico pointed out, last night s leak was historic, and not in a good way: No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.
I called up one of the smartest professors I know at one of the top law schools in the country, and he echoed that: To my knowledge, it s never happened before in the modern history of the court. It is the most serious possible breach.
Serious, severe, shocking, he said. But in the end, not surprising. Why not? Here s how he put it: To me, the leak is not surprising because many of the people we ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing.
What did he mean by that? They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.
He went on: I m sure this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.
That’s about the size of it.
I think I see this leak, if that’s what it turns out to be, as bit less shocking than those more closely associated with SCOTUS do. Sometimes diminution of esprit is more obvious from the outside than from the inside.
The Court should obviously beef up its security and consult experts on how to do that. Roberts, Ch. J, should appoint somebody to investigate the leak, find out who did it, if that’s possible, and dismiss them from service, assuming it wasn’t a fellow Justice, of course.
Perhaps I am less exercised than many about this event because I view it as far less serious than, for example, the nomination self- and other-immolation events that we have already gotten used to.