In the final opinion of its October 2022 Term, issued on July 4, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the United States Constitution unconstitutional. In an opinion by Chief Justice For All Practical Purposes Clarence Thomas, the Court dug Titanic-deep into its shadow docket and relied on its newly discovered longstanding practices of deciding cases based on the doctrines of “cherry-picked deep history” and “making stuff up.” In a 6-3 decision in Good Ol’ Boys & Brothers But Not Sisters LLC v. United States, the Court sided with Good Ol’ Boys and wrote that “in the long history of human societies, constitutions are a recent anomaly and therefore cannot be deemed to have sufficient historical roots to accord them legal authority or respect.” The six-member majority determined “any other conclusion would be egregiously wrong and cannot be tolerated.”
In other Independence Day decisions issued before Good Ol' Boys, the Court:
- held that the Second Amendment allows individuals to own atomic weapons because "although the Founders did not prohibit individual ownership of atomic weapons, atoms had been posited nearly 2,100 years before the Second Amendment, so atomic weapons would obviously have been foreseen by the Amendment's authors,” NRA v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives;
- affirmed a lower court decision declaring the Earth to be flat, Flat Earthers Ltd. v. NASA, NOAA & EPA;
- affirmed that a legislature can declare the value of pi to be 3.2, State of Indiana v. International Society for Real Math;
- affirmed without briefing or oral argument that women are the property of men, Christian Nationalists, Inc. v. Human Dignity for All, Inc.; and
- in New Confederacy LLC v. NAACP Legal Defense Fund, overruled Loving v. Virginia and held interracial marriage to be a violation of the laws of nature, quoting specifically from Kinney v. Virginia, 71 Va. 858 (1878): "Marriage, the most elementary and useful of all, must be regulated and controlled by the sovereign power of the state. The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization, under which two distinct races are to work out and accomplish the destiny to which the Almighty has assigned them on this continent--all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion."
Chief Justice In Name Only John Roberts joined all the results and filed a separate concurrence in each case expressing his preference for the Court to reach the same result incrementally. No other Justice joined his concurrences.
Dissenting in each case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor quoted John McEnroe, writing “You cannot be serious!” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissents, “I haven’t encountered this much nonsense in one place since I was a five-year-old reading Edward Lear.” Justice Elena Kagan wrote the shortest dissents in Supreme Court history: “WTF????”
Asked about the Court’s recent decisions, Senator Susan Collins (R-Me.) furrowed her brow and said she was “concerned” about the direction the Court was going but would wait and see before commenting further.