Richard George Kopf, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, declared earlier this week that it’s time for the Supreme Court to “STFU.”
Kopf published the request as part of an article on his blog about the Supreme Court’s recent decision Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.
Appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1992, Kopf wrote that “To the average person, the result [in the Hobby Lobby case] looks stupid and smells worse.”
In the Hobby Lobby case, 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. To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.
Elaborating on that idea, he wrote:
To most people, the decision looks stupid ’cause corporations are not persons, all the legal mumbo jumbo notwithstanding. The decision looks misogynistic because the majority were all men. It looks partisan because all were appointed by a Republican. The decision looks religiously motivated because each member of the majority belongs to the Catholic church, and that religious organization is opposed to contraception. While “looks” don’t matter to the logic of the law (and I am not saying the Justices are actually motivated by such things), all of us know from experience that appearances matter to the public’s acceptance of the law.
Kopf went on to suggest that the Supreme Court should have avoided hearing the case altogether:
What would have happened if the Supreme Court simply decided not to take the Hobby Lobby cases? What harm would have befallen the nation? What harm would have befallen Hobby Lobby family members who would have been free to express their religious beliefs as real persons? Had the Court sat on the sidelines, I don’t think any significant harm would have occurred. The most likely result is that one or more of the political branches of government would have worked something out.
He ended the piece with a bang, writing:
Next term is the time for the Supreme Court to go quiescent–this term and several past terms have 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.
To clarify his point, Kopf even included a link to the term “stfu” in the Urban Dictionary for any reader(s) who might not be familiar with the term.
ABC News was able to confirm with the Kopf’s Nebraska office that he is indeed the author of the blog ‘Hercules and the Umpire.’”
In a section of his blog titled “The Who, The Why, and The Title of this Blog,” Kopf explains “I am now on senior status, and with that change in status (plus advancing age) my reticence to blog has lessened. I think I have something worth writing about.”
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