Senior High Court commentator Linda Greenhouse described the Supreme Court on the brink of profound change.​​​

Here is the Supreme Court commentator, then Linda Greenhouse.

No one else has Greenhouse's ability to explain the importance of court decisions, let alone her contact with seemingly everyone in Washington, DC, and her absolute talent as a writer. For decades, she has been a familiar face in Supreme Court debates—think Anna Wintour in Fashion Week or Spike Lee in the Knicks game—and wrote more than 2,800 articles for The New York Times. Recently also writing and lecturing at Yale University Law School.

Now Greenhouse has turned his attention to the slow motion revolution that the Supreme Court is doing in a new book called "Justice on the Edge". As this book occasionally shows in unbearable details, we are living in unprecedented moments in the courtroom: the three far-right justices, all carefully selected by religious extremists and confirmed under the dark cloud of illegality, are " "On the edge", as the title of the greenhouse implies, fundamentally changes the way our Republic treats civil rights, the equal protection of the law, and the nature of our democracy itself.

To some extent, Justice Fringe believes that with the appointment of Justice Amy Connie Barrett, this shift has occurred, and she hastily appeared in court after the 2020 presidential election has begun. Some of my Supreme Court commentators have agreed that the court now actually belongs to Barrett.

But this seems premature. Although there have been some rumblings of change, as Greenhouse described, we are definitely still on the verge-not yet. More radical changes are about to take place this semester. The court is going to overturn or restrict Roe v. Wade, greatly expand the scope of the Second Amendment and reduce the scope of the administrative state.

In fact, in Greenhouse's introduction on "Twelve Months to Change the Supreme Court", people were shocked at the extent to which the court had not changed. It survived, perhaps the biggest threat to its legitimacy: Donald Trump's heinous efforts to withdraw the 2020 election. There is no 2020 version of Bush v. Gore. The election to Bush has violated decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence (especially in respect of state courts) and permanently tarnished the court’s reputation. In fact, the Supreme Court dismissed Trump's frivolous lawsuit, which made the former president very angry, and Greenhouse recorded his anger verbatim. "We let him pass," Trump said of Judge Brett Kavanaugh on January 6, while inciting a rebellion against Congress. "Do you know? They don't care... They are all trying to hurt us all, hurt our country."

Not only did the court “fail” to succumb to Trump, the transformed Supreme Court rejected the party’s lack of prestige of the Affordable Care Act with a 6 to 3 vote, and exempted the Catholic foster care institution from civil rights law by a 6 to 3 vote. The foundation is narrow, not the broad and far-reaching foundation required by Christian right-wing organizations. Both of these results are judicially conservative, but the results are conducive to (or at least not undermining) liberal interests.

In fact, Greenhouse bluntly stated on the foster care case, "The winner of the Fulton case is Roberts." This is not a reformed court; this is a court that has shown amazing resilience in the face of tremendous pressure.

It is true that on the last day of the term, the court announced two tough decisions on voting rights (anti) and black money (approval). But the same thing will happen in these situations before Ginsberg-Barrett changes, and Chief Justice John Roberts, portrayed as a pragmatic moderate by the Greenhouse, has actually been depriving voting rights for decades.

Greenhouse did not pay attention to these high-profile decisions. Instead, it spent a lot of time on small cases — death penalty appeals, various administrative law decisions, and the expansion of religious school rights — she said, these cases showed a steady drip. -Drop to the right. Maybe, but here, "Justice on the Edge" reads like there are too many greenhouses for court observers and too few greenhouses for social commentators. Even to the nerds of the Supreme Court, these little things are like too many trees and too few forests.

However, the most powerful argument for the greenhouse is in the field of religion. Here, when Judge Barrett entered the bench, the court did experience a revolution. The evidence was a series of four cases regarding COVID-19 regulations and whether religious institutions might be bound by them. Two cases were decided by Judge Ginsberg, and the court ruled that the government sought to protect public health; the two together with Judge Barrett sought exemptions for the church from these rules.

More importantly (Greenhouse downplays the radical nature of the court’s conservative majority here), the court’s tough power has repeatedly claimed that states discriminate against religious institutions by placing religious institutions on scientifically reasonable standards. Judge Kavanaugh complained that California’s regulations “discriminate places of worship and favor similar secular businesses”, although pharmacies (one of his examples) are not epidemiologically comparable to churches, where large groups of people gather , Talking and singing. Hour. Judge Gorsuch criticized Nevada for "entertainment is worse than religion", despite the fact that casinos are not as dangerous as churches in the spread of COVID, and wrote that a California rule distinguishes churches from bus terminals (again, in popular Completely different in disease) is equivalent to "a country so clearly discriminates against religion."

Frankly speaking, all this is strange. It does not have to be Anthony Fauci to understand that churches are more susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 than bus terminals or pharmacies. what is the problem?

This is perhaps the weakest point in the Greenhouse book: it refuses to participate, anyway more than a few pages, and now has a perfect pipeline-first revealed in these pages, and later dramatized by the Senator during Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearing Sheldon Whitehouse-Combining black money religious extremists (mainly far-right Catholics, but if anyone points this out, they will immediately be accused of paranoia) with the Federalist Association, the Judicial Crisis Network, and others previously established by DC The shell organization run by the player connects Leonard Leo, the Trump White House and the Supreme Court.

This pipeline provides us with all three of Trump’s justices: one sitting in a seat stolen from President Obama, one sitting under the cloud of uninvestigated sexual assault allegations, and one The body of her predecessor was still warm and the Senate Republicans explored the circumstance confirmed the absurdity of this hypocrisy.

And all this Christian right-wing, religious extremist funding — we may never know where it came from — has now changed the balance of courts for a generation, unless the moderate Democrats in the Senate are miraculously persuaded to rebalance it through reforms. (Don't count on it.) As the COVID case shows, these new judges live in a world of religious ideology that is very different from that of most Americans, where a secularist government plots a conspiracy against the church and Christians are persecuted.

Although claiming that investigating these backgrounds is inappropriate to some extent, they all bluntly base their decisions on these beliefs, values, and experiences. Justice Barrett’s legal review article, Justice Gorsuch In the opinion, Justice Alito gave a fierce speech. Senator Dianne Feinstein (Dianne Feinstein) is correct about Justice Barrett: dogma exists resoundingly in her heart. Loudly-not only energetic or spiritual, but also the voice that can now determine the law for hundreds of millions of people.

In a speech at the University of Louisville, Judge Barrett recently complained that many members of the public thought the court was "a group of partisan hackers." But this is not a real complaint. The problem is not that these new judges are partisans or hackers; none of them are. The problem is that they are religious activists who are both hostile to secular culture and complain that secular culture is hostile to religion. I'm not sure which is more terrifying: are these smart and accomplished jurists cynically obliterating the scientific differences between churches and pharmacies, or they can't actually see them.

Either way, as the work of Linda Greenhouse shows, the stadium is indeed on the verge of a new era, which is different from what we have seen before.