Blogging Jurist to Supreme Court: ‘STFU’
The Supreme Court is used to having its decisions publicly criticized, but rarely in R-rated language spouted by a federal judge, who says the justices should just “stfu.”
The remarks come from Nebraska-based Judge Richard Kopf, who has a reputation for provocative commentary on his personal blog.
Kopf, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, criticized the high court’s ruling last week in the so-called “Hobby Lobby” case.
The decision gave some for-profit businesses the right to deny birth control coverage to their employees if they opposed on religious grounds. The 5-4 decision against a provision of Obamacare was predictably divided in public opinion.
“Five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a ‘person’ entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate because that corporation was ‘closely held’ by family members,” he wrote. “To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.”
And he went further. “Next term is the time for the Supreme Court to go quiescent— this term and several past terms has proven that the court is now causing more harm (division) to our democracy than good by deciding hot button cases that the court has the power to avoid. As the kids say, it is time for the Court to stfu.”