Chief Justice Roberts, this is your moment of consequence. History will either laud you for preserving America’s 221-year arc toward justice or it will align you and your Court with tyranny.

You may need reminding that the Supreme Court has no army. You have no police; you lack all mechanisms of enforcement. Your authority depends on America’s trust in the rule of law, which you are allowing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to mock. Having spent nearly 30 years as a federal trial lawyer, under an oath to promote, uphold and defend the Constitution, I feel mocked, as do many of my colleagues. Unlike the partisan zealots on your bench, we took our oaths to heart. Many of us wish we hadn’t.

It is clear Congress will need to step in now to reign in your venal rogues since you apparently will not.

Alito and Thomas, batting for theocracy, have consistently bastardized the Establishment Clause into a tool for inflicting their own religion onto others, exactly the opposite of what Thomas Jefferson counseled. Men who gave their lives to separate church and state are rolling in their graves at Alito’s Christian Nationalist flag, and Thomas’ voyeuristic obsession with what goes on in other people’s bedrooms. A vitriolic and aggrieved duo, their dissent in Obergefell painted equality in sepia tones of their own bitter resentment: Marriage equality would “vilify” Americans “unwilling to assent” to the “new orthodoxy” of gays living in dignity. Then, feigning originalism in Dobbs, they vitiated Equal Protection, elevating the legal rights of zygotes over........

© Salon