Liberal SCOTUS Justices Mocked by Colleagues for Cherrypicking

(TargetDailyNews.com) – The Supreme Court recently released several substantive decisions that affect the ability of federal government agencies to interpret law without Congressional oversight and more.

The one rankling liberals the most ruled that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for their official acts, but not for their non-presidency-related actions. Dissenting liberal justice Sonya Sotomayor is particularly upset about this one, claiming that it makes the president “a king above the law.”

But that’s not the only decision that has irritated Sotomayor. The Court’s recent ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy held that those accused of securities fraud have the right to a jury trial. The Securities and Exchange Commission cannot try to make the ruling “in-house” and deprive the accused of a day in court.

The Court’s conservative majority, in polite and lawyerly language, seems to be suggesting that the liberal justices are misrepresenting legal facts. At issue is the concept of “precedent.” This refers to the usual practice of courts following the procedural steps and principles established by earlier rulings, unless the Court decides an established precedent was decided wrongly.

In their dissent to the SEC case, Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson claim the majority’s decision “upends longstanding precedent and the established practice of its coequal partners in our tripartite system of Government.”

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch responded by writing that their dissent seemed to pick and choose cases specifically to make their point without acknowledging cases contrary to the liberal Justices’ claims. The opinion looks at “only a small handful” of cases, he wrote. Gorsuch said their approach was like a “picky child at the dinner table.”

He went even further, stating that the dissenters’ view was “wholly at odds” with all relevant precedents, both historic and current.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts injected a bit of mild snark in the majority opinion, which gave a nod to the dissenters. In a footnote, Roberts wrote that the dissenting Justices “must be reading from a different case than we are.”