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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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No. I want conservatives to be the same as liberals. They turn the SC into a fantasy world or a Senate when they want to. I want the same benefits that liberals have. When they want gay marriage they make up law. When they want Roe they make up law.

Nothing you say is going to convince me that they’re not all liberal hacks with no respect for the law. I don’t care if they’re 160 IQ and write eloquent opinions or 85 IQ and just say they did something because they wanted to. To quote The Office, “It’s the same Picture”. A prostitute is still a prostitute whether she’s giving $10 hand jobs or getting $500k a night. A partisan hack is well Ruth Ginsburg because she wrote law which is NOT her job.

And Yes making up law when you control the SC is beneficial to your side. I’m down with that since we own the court now.

At this point, you should drop the language about judicial restraint, judicial bias, and respect for the law. Your position from my understanding is: “Blues used the Court as a political weapon, so I want Reds to use it as a political weapon too.” That may be honest, but it is not a rule-of-law position, it's just power politics.

The important distinction is between “this is bad legal theory” vs “legal theory does not matter.” You can think Roe or Obergefell were badly reasoned, yet that doesn't have to lead right away to "judges should openly act like partisan legislators when our side controls the Court". Once you say “we own the Court now,” you have basically accepted the premise that the Court is just another legislature. And if that is true, then you have no principled objection when blue judges do the same thing next time, or when blues try to pack the Court.

Roe is actually a useful example here. Even if it helped liberals for decades, that was, as it turns out, temporary. Roe made the conflict more bitter, less settled, and more legitimacy-destroying. Your version of judicial nihilism would create the same problem in reverse.

So I understand the impulse for revenge, but that is what it is: revenge. It is not really about the Constitution or the rule of law anymore. It is about using the Court as a weapon because you believe the other side did it first. But there will always be people to your left and to your right, and no faction gets to bludgeon everyone else forever because that is not a stable or decent way to run a constitutional system.

It’s game theory. I prefer both sides follow the letter of the law. Once one side has defected the optimal strategy is also to defect.

Sub-optimal outcome but I do not believe the left has acted in good faith.