Nine activists dressed in toga: this is the Supreme Court of the United States

If you are one of those who believe that Spanish Justice is politicized and that it should be like that of the

, keep dreaming.

Because the American judges in the movies, those who make their Solomonic rulings with a deep voice and a straight figure, before God and before History, are one of the creations of Hollywood furthest from reality, with the possible exception of Chewbacca, the monster furry from 'Star Wars'.

The best example?

The Supreme Court, which is a kind of priestly college, of the Sanhedrin, which interprets the sacred text (the Constitution) on which the political, economic, social, and cultural structure of a country that has an identity that is not historical is based, but ideological.

It is not only a Court in which each magistrate votes for the party to which he belongs.

It is also a court in which one of the members (Clarence Thomas) is married to a woman who is among the organizers of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2020, in which the supporters of

tried to prevent the ratification of the electoral victory of

.

The same court in which the son of another magistrate, Anthony Kennedy, played a key role in getting the bank he worked for, Deutsche Bank, to give Donald Trump - who would later become president - a $640 million loan (610 million euros).

Kennedy never recused himself in any case during the Trump presidency, just as Thomas is not going to do it in the processes that are likely to end up in the Supreme Court on the assault on Capitol Hill, despite the fact that his wife, Ginni, sent text messages to the head of Cabinet of then President Mark Meadows, asking him to invalidate the election results.

In other messages, the judge's wife expressed her wish that "the Biden crime family, and their election-falsifying cronies (elected officials, officials, social media censors, fake journalists, etc.) be arrested and detained." for electoral fraud right now and in the next few days and end up living in barges in Guantanamo, until they are tried in military courts for sedition.

The reference to the "barges"

is the icing on the cake, because in the US these and other types of boats have historically been used as prisons famous for their unsanitary conditions, closer to floating concentration camps than prisons.

Thomas also attended Donald Trump's 'Stop The Theft' rally on January 6, 2020, which ended at the

, but did not recognize it until the investigation of the US Congress uncovered it in March.

The problem is not new.

In fact, back in 2000, Thomas also did not recuse himself when he voted to suspend the vote count in Florida, thus handing over the presidency to

on whose election campaign Ginni worked as a consultant.

Once again, his performance was unremarkable.

His Supreme Court partner, Antonin Scalia, did not refrain from participating either, despite the fact that two of his sons worked at the law firm that represented Bush.

The problem with this politicization is that its power is overwhelming in a country like the US, where it is

due to the qualified majority system of the Senate, which requires that 60% of the chamber support the vast majority of the regulations.

So those nine men and women decide everything.

That includes legalizing anal sex (2015);

patents for living beings - potentially even people - created in laboratories (1980);

same-sex marriage (2015);

unlimited donations from companies, individuals or organizations, US or foreign, to political campaigns as long as that money is not managed by the candidates, but by organizations separate from them (2010);

suspend the death penalty (1972), and reauthorize it (1976).

And there are also other cases, less well known, but more exotic, such as authorizing the arrest of 21 people at a squat party with joints and strippers (2018);

declare that it is in accordance with the Constitution to spank a 14-year-old boy 20 times in the ass (1977);

or allowing a high school magazine to publish an article about the divorce of the parents of a teenage student and the pregnancy of another (1988).

An ideological court without an ethical code

All these examples combine with a curious paradox: the Supreme Court of the United States does not have an ethical code.

Its members answer to no one.

Their rules in terms of conflicts of interest are fantastically lax.

Two decades ago,

on a taxpayer-paid plane while the Supreme Court decided whether Guantánamo prisoners had the right to go to court to ask for their release (the The ruling was favorable, which was a blow to Cheney, although Scalia voted against it).

In 2014 alone, Scalia made 24 all-expenses-paid speaking trips.

Democrat Sonia Sotomayor followed, with 16. Because the judges of the Supreme Court do not work in the summer, and they often take advantage of that period to get extra income.

In 1980, a legal adviser to President Ronald Reagan named John Roberts wrote in an internal government memo that "only schoolchildren and Supreme Court justices have the right to take the entire summer off."

We do not know if he thinks the same today, but everything seems to indicate that the opinion of this jurist matured significantly when in 2005 he was appointed president of the Supreme Court.

In reality, these magistrates are accountable to no one.

.

And yet, they vote according to their ideology.

They did so by giving the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, by ratifying the constitutionality of Obama's health reform in 2012, by allowing unlimited donations from people, companies and organizations, American and foreign, to electoral campaigns in 2010, and , now, repeal abortion and let it become the responsibility of the states (if the leaked draft is not altered, which seems very unlikely).

The ideologization

judicial instance is overwhelming, and has been reinforced in the last decade.

When in 1973 that same Court authorized abortion, it did so with the favorable vote of five Republicans and two Democrats, and against one Democrat and one Republican.

Today, that would be impossible.

The five justices who have voted in favor are Republicans.

The three who will do it against are Democrats.

In a

- five of the nine judges belong to that religious denomination - but ideology is more important than religion.

Three Catholic Republicans (Alito, who wrote the ruling, Barrett, and Thomas) support outlawing abortion.

A Catholic Democrat (Sotomayor), is opposed.

A Catholic who in social matters could be defined as nonpartisan (Roberts) has not spoken.

The political program is above faith.

Anything goes to kill a judge

The extraordinary power of the Supreme Court also turns the lives of its judges into a circus.

Every time there is a vacancy - or it occurs due to the death or retirement of the incumbent - the succession process takes on farcical overtones.

Democrats have mastered the art of using judges' pasts to try to thwart proposed nominations by Republican presidents.

This is how we know that Clarence Thomas likes pornography, and that, before coming to court, he

Anita Hill, inviting her to watch erotic movies.

Things took on gossip show levels when, in 2010, 19 years after Thomas's confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice, Ginni left a message on Hill's office answering machine asking him to retract the testimony he had given in court. confirmation sessions of the judge in the Senate.

Or what Brett Kavaunagh likes to put in his beer.

According to his critics, this judge raped one or more girls at parties decades ago, but those claims seem impossible to prove.

The message is clear: anything goes to 'charge' a judge.

Last month, Republicans tried to accuse the new justice, Ketanji Brown, of being soft on pederasty,

It all started with conservative Justice Robert Bork, one of the most influential jurists in US history, especially in competition law, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987. The Democrats reacted to the nomination with such a ferocious attack that even the list of movies that Bork had rented from the video store was made public (unlike with Thomas, the titles included films as non-morbid as 'A Day at the Races', by the Marx Brothers, or 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' by Alfred Hitchcock).

The attack was so fierce that Bork's nomination was rejected, and the English language acquired a new verb, "to bork", which means "to obstruct the appointment of someone (especially a candidate for public office) by means of defamation." and vilification."

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