Everyone loves what the Chief Justice said!

TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 2024

"Truth pirate" stymied by Roberts: As a general matter, we have an unfavorable view of Lauren Windsor and her surreptitious audiotapes.

Windsor may be completely sincere in her self-celebrated role as a "relentless truth pirate." That said, our general view would be this:

God save our floundering Blue America from the (well-intentioned) efforts of people like Windsor! 

In fairness, we'll also say this:

Everyone liked what Chief Justice Roberts said when he was surreptitiously taped by Windsor this year. As has been widely noted, he took the appropriately judicious view. 

The Chief Justice didn't know he was being taped—but that didn't seem to matter! As you can see from the (amazingly brief) tape which Windsor has released, her first question went like this:

WINDSOR: I just want to ask something. I want to be totally appropriate with the, you know, jurisprudence of it all. 

But you know, just to be totally candid, like how do we get America back to a place of like, really, like less polarization? Because I feel like the Court is undergoing this period of turmoil. Like, people don't trust in, I think—just the, like this is like the last bastion of, I think, like public trust, and how do we get back to that?

The trap had been set for Roberts! By now, almost everyone has agreed that he adopted the appropriate stance.

In what follows, we'll drop a brief comment regarding press coverage of the Court. Here's the rest of the exchange, as recorded by Windsor:

ROBERTS (continuing directly): I wish I knew. I don’t know...I really don’t know. 

I mean, ordinary people—"ordinary" isn't the right word. American citizens in general need to work on this, to try to heal this polarization, because it’s very dangerous. I do believe it's very dangerous.

WINDSOR: I think it's taking us to the brink of, you know, very serious and perhaps, like non-repairable rifts in the country. I for one am someone like, I support your ruling on Dobbs. I support like— 

I am very pro-life. But like, you know, I don't know how we bridge that gap. You know, like how do we get people—

ROBERTS: I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I don't know. It's not—I don't think it's something we can do.  

WINDSOR: But the Court can't do anything [unintelligible]?

ROBERTS: We have a very defined role, and we need to do what we're supposed to do. But this is a bigger problem. This is way above us. So, I wish I knew the answer, I do.

Chief Justice Roberts is pro-life too—but he skillfully slid past the bait! He bemoaned the nation's polarization, even concerning abortion rights, but he said it isn't the role of the Supreme Court to fix situations like that. 

(Or like, you know, something like that. The exchanges on these tapes are so brief that it's hard to say exactly what has been said.)

"We have a very defined role," the Chief Justice said, "and we need to do what we're supposed to do."

"This is way above us," he added. He said polarization is a problem, but solving that problem isn't a task which falls within the Court's purview.

Everyone loves what Roberts said when he was taped by Windsor! But as you may already know, that isn't a transcript of Windsor's (very brief) Q-and-A with Chief Justice Roberts.

In fact, that's the transcript of her (very brief) exchange with Justice Alito back in 2023. His statements were so anodyne that she didn't release the tape or transcript at the time. For unknown reasons, she stuck this year-old transcript on the end of the tape of her extremely brief recent exchange with Alito—their extremely brief Q-and-A from 2024.

Did Alito make crazy statements this time around? On balance, we'd have to say no. But at times like these—at times of tribal polarization and fear of defeat—members of warring tribes are prepared to believe whatever negative thing they're told about whatever some targeted figure has said. 

So it has gone with this bombshell report from this high profile "truth pirate." 

The woods are lovely dark and deep, but our flailing nation has been playing this type of game for a very long time now. On balance, it has worked poorly for Blue America's interests. That said, our behavior isn't likely to change.

In our view, this has been the latest unhelpful "creative paraphrase" show. On balance, these endless shows have worked very poorly for progressive and liberal interests. Your mileage, of course, may differ. 

You can watch Windsor's amazingly brief chunks of tape, from 2023 and 2024, just by clicking here.

Warning! You'll be hearing a lot of verbiage from Windsor, much less from Alito himself!

We know, we know—you disagree! So these episodes tend to go. Do we need to find ways to do better?