Former Judge Resigns From the Supreme Court Bar (lost faith in the Court)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/judge-james-dannenberg-supreme-court-bar-roberts-letter.htmlOn Wednesday, Dannenberg tendered a letter of resignation from the Supreme Court Bar to Chief Justice John Roberts. He has been a member of that bar since 1972. In his letter, reprinted in full below, Dannenberg compares the current Supreme Court, with its boundless solicitude for the rights of the wealthy, the privileged, and the comfortable, to the court that ushered in the Lochner era in the early 20th century, a period of profound judicial activism that put a heavy thumb on the scale for big business, banking, and insurance interests, and ruled consistently against child labor, fair wages, and labor regulations.
The Chief Justice of the United States
One First Street, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20543
March 11, 2020
Dear Chief Justice Roberts:
I hereby resign my membership in the Supreme Court Bar.
This was not an easy decision. I have been a member of the Supreme Court Bar since 1972, far longer than you have, and appeared before the Court, both in person and on briefs, on several occasions as Deputy and First Deputy Attorney General of Hawaii before being appointed as a Hawaii District Court judge in 1986. I have a high regard for the work of the Federal Judiciary and taught the Federal Courts course at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law for a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. This due regard spanned the tenures of Chief Justices Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist before your appointment and confirmation in 2005. I have not always agreed with the Court’s decisions, but until recently I have generally seen them as products of mainstream legal reasoning, whether liberal or conservative. The legal conservatism I have respected– that of, for example, Justice Lewis Powell, Alexander Bickel or Paul Bator– at a minimum enshrined the idea of stare decisis and eschewed the idea of radical change in legal doctrine for political ends.
I can no longer say that with any confidence. You are doing far more— and far worse– than “calling balls and strikes.” You are allowing the Court to become an “errand boy” for an administration that has little respect for the rule of law.
The Court, under your leadership and with your votes, has wantonly flouted established precedent. Your “conservative” majority has cynically undermined basic freedoms by hypocritically weaponizing others. The ideas of free speech and religious liberty have been transmogrified to allow officially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination, as well as to elevate the grossest forms of political bribery beyond the ability of the federal government or states to rationally regulate it. More than a score of decisions during your tenure have overturned established precedents—some more than forty years old– and you voted with the majority in most. There is nothing “conservative” about this trend. This is radical “legal activism” at its worst.
Without trying to write a law review article, I believe that the Court majority, under your leadership, has become little more than a result-oriented extension of the right wing of the Republican Party, as vetted by the Federalist Society. Yes, politics has always been a factor in the Court’s history, but not to today’s extent. Even routine rules of statutory construction get subverted or ignored to achieve transparently political goals. The rationales of “textualism” and “originalism” are mere fig leaves masking right wing political goals; sheer casuistry.
Your public pronouncements suggest that you seem concerned about the legitimacy of the Court in today’s polarized environment. We all should be. Yet your actions, despite a few bromides about objectivity, say otherwise.
It is clear to me that your Court is willfully hurtling back to the cruel days of Lochner and even Plessy. The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.
I predict that your legacy will ultimately be as diminished as that of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who presided over both Plessy and Lochner. It still could become that of his revered fellow Justice John Harlan the elder, an honest conservative, but I doubt that it will. Feel free to prove me wrong.
The Supreme Court of the United States is respected when it wields authority and not mere power. As has often been said, you are infallible because you are final, but not the other way around.
I no longer have respect for you or your majority, and I have little hope for change. I can’t vote you out of office because you have life tenure, but I can withdraw whatever insignificant support my Bar membership might seem to provide.
Please remove my name from the rolls.
With deepest regret,
James Dannenberg
= new reply since forum marked as read
Like all the moderate repubs who have resigned from Congress, know their seat will likely be filled with some Qanon nut. WTF? 
I mean they were bad enough 2 years ago. Now they're off the deep end and zoomed all the way off into la-la-land.
I doubt if any do also. 
Their names are Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer (soon to be replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson). The problem is that there aren't enough of them. That's just one reason why some of us are in favor of reforming and expanding the Court.
Right now, after Trump and McConnell's tampering, the SCOTUS is a joke. A VERY bad joke.
I've lost count of the number of political cartoons I've seen picturing Brat KavanUGH that reference beer in some way. Basically, like, ALL of them! 
Whatever else happens, we can take at least some tiny measure of comfort from the fact that he is NEVER going to live down his little "I like beer! Do YOU like beer?" tantrum!
The judge resigned in March, 2020.
Your honor, I object to this history being interpreted as news without acknowledgement of its original date of publication. I'd suggest a big, thick, red circle be drawn around the date shown at the beginning of the letter, perhaps with a sharpie. An additional arrow pointing to said date would not be amiss.
And I'd like to bring to the court's attention the interesting fact of time's passage. Time, apparently passes, you see, and that separation between a contemporary event and a historic event can be measured using the guileless mechanics of mathematics to place our understanding squarely in the frame of refence we call "old news". I suggest that while the subject is pertinent to our current era, it should be packaged as an "anti-laconic" observance of similarity. I rest my case.
He would have received this letter from Judge Dannenberg over 2 years ago. Did he even read it?
How can Roberts reconcile these comments with the way Amy Coney Barrett got "rushed" onto the court in record time after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg? (Ginsberg was barely in the ground before the hearings commenced for Barrett.) So much has happened since March of 2020 and it leads us to wonder, how far right is the Roberts court trying to go?
in telling it like it is...my hats of to Mr. Dannenberg
