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All of the United States’ government’s most important institutions are failing at once.

Congress, of course, has long been barely able to function. Every year it struggles merely to fund the rest of the government, and the risk that Congress will trigger a debt ceiling breach that would set the global economy on fire is alarmingly high. Congressional dysfunction has only grown worse under a Republican Party that can barely manage to choose a House speaker, much less enact legislation.

The Republican Party has atrophied into a cult of personality, centered on an authoritarian goon who literally tried to overthrow the duly elected United States government. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, may be unable to dislodge a senescent leader who is no longer capable of making the case against his imperious opponent.

And then there’s the Supreme Court, perhaps the only branch of the United States government that is capable of speaking in complete sentences right now. Don’t confuse the Court’s relative eloquence for competence, however. 

The justices are barely able to manage their own docket, a docket, by the way, that’s been shrinking for decades. They publish incompetently drafted decisions that sow confusion throughout the judiciary, then refuse to accept responsibility when those decisions lead to ridiculous and immoral outcomes. They take liberties with the facts of their cases, and they can’t even be trusted to read the plain text of an unambiguous statute correctly. In just the last few years, they’ve overruled so many seminal precedents that law professors no longer know how to teach their classes. 

And yet, despite their own incompetence, the justices continue to claim more and more power — even though they simply do not have the personnel they’d need to address every policy question that they’ve added to their own plates. 

Worse, the United States has a Dunning-Kruger Supreme Court. The justices aren’t just very bad at their jobs, they appear to be blissfully unaware of just how terrible they are at those jobs. How else can one explain, say, their decision to replace all of American Second Amendment law with a novel and impossible-to-apply legal test — one that led to astonishingly depraved results — and then to offer no new guidance to lower court judges, after all but one of the justices realized just how badly they’d screwed up?

As the curtain falls on the Supreme Court’s most recent term, no one should think that this particular panel of judges is capable of doing their jobs. I have a fuller article on Vox.com outlining all the travesties of this term (you can read it here), but here are two egregious ones.

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The Court’s inability to create sensible legal rules was on full display in its most closely watched decision of the term: Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case.

The holding of Trump is truly shocking. One question that loomed over this case is, in the words of a lower court judge who earlier heard the Trump case, whether Trump could be prosecuted if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.” Though the Trump opinion does not answer this question directly, it’s hard to read it to permit such a murderous president to be prosecuted.

For starters, Trump holds “the courts have ‘no power to control [the president’s] discretion’ when he acts pursuant to the powers invested exclusively in him by the Constitution.” One of those powers is the ability to give orders to the military — the Constitution provides that the president “shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in dissent, “When [the president] uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

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The Court’s just-completed term also featured one of the biggest power grabs in the Court’s recent history. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo makes the Supreme Court the final word on hundreds or even thousands of policy questions that Congress delegated to federal agencies like the EPA or the Department of Labor.

These questions concern some big policy disputes, such as who is entitled to overtime pay or how to reduce greenhouse emissions by power plants. But they also concern a much broader array of minor and often very technical policy disputes that few people are likely to care about. The Loper Bright case itself, for example, asked whether the government or the vessels themselves must pay for federal observers who sometimes accompany fishing vessels at sea.

One bizarre thing about Loper Bright is that the Supreme Court already gave itself an unchecked veto power over anything involving what the Court calls a “major question” — that is, agency actions that involve a matter of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’” So the justices were already the final word on policy questions that sparked meaningful political disagreement. All that Loper Bright does is force the courts to decide many more less significant questions.

These are questions like how much residents of Kauai, Hawaii, should pay for cable television service, or whether a wastewater treatment plant in Taunton, Massachusetts, emits too much nitrogen — questions, in other words, that are both far beyond the expertise of the justices, and that are so small they aren’t really worth the time of the nine most powerful officials in the most powerful nation that has ever existed.

The Supreme Court, moreover, has nine justices, each of whom typically hires four law clerks to assist them. That’s nowhere near enough staff to handle the firehose of hypertechnical policy questions the Court just directed at itself.

The unmanageable volume of cases headed the Court’s way will be further magnified by the Republican justices’ recent decision in Corner Post v. Federal Reserve, which effectively eliminates the six-year statute of limitations that used to apply to lawsuits challenging federal regulations. 

So thoughts and prayers to the justices, who will now have to deal with the unmanageable workload they’ve created for themselves, even as they are unable to handle the cases already on their docket in a competent manner.

— Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent 

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Zack Beauchamp is joined by scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta to discuss the past and present of Indian liberalism, and what it says about the future of global politics.

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Today's edition was produced and edited by Sean Collins.  Thanks for reading; we hope to see you tomorrow!

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