When reports first trickled out that Justice Neil Gorsuch refused to wear a mask in the courtroom, and that as a result his fellow Supreme Court judge Sonia Sotomayor needed to work through Zoom as a result, the backlash was swift and unsurprising. No doubt with an eye toward protecting its reputation as an august body above petty partisan bickering, the court and its representatives quickly moved to squash the rumors. While it is still unclear what exactly has happened, the justices would like you to think everyone remains respectful to each other, while skeptics and leaks insist tensions are at a historic high.
Ultimately, such reports reveal a deeper problem of partisanship within the nation's highest court. It is the same problem revealed, with far more serious and obvious consequences, in the bench's recent decision about President Joe Biden's vaccine mandates. We live in an era when major decisions about public health are motivated by a partisanship so intense that even educated men and women on America's most powerful court will display willful scientific illiteracy in order to sustain their positions. This was seen in the decision to overturn the vaccine mandates — and is perhaps most effectively illustrated through a contrast with how the Supreme Court handled a similar case more than a century earlier.
