Dowd Unleashed: Supreme Court 'Run By Hacks," Stole Election for Bush

In her Wednesday column for the Times, "Men In Black," Maureen Dowd defended Obama's attack on the Supreme Court, which she says helped steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush, and accused Justice Clarence Thomas of having "lied his way onto the court."

This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history.

It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes.

....

In 2000, the Republican majority put aside its professed disdain of judicial activism and helped to purloin the election for W., who went on to heedlessly invade Iraq and callously ignore Katrina.

As Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times back then, “Deciding a case of this magnitude with such disregard for reason invites people to treat the court’s aura of reason as an illusion.”

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Just as in the Senate’s shameful Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the liberals on the court focus on process and the conservatives focus on results. John Roberts Jr.’s benign beige facade is deceiving; he’s a crimson partisan, simply more cloaked than the ideologically rigid and often venomous Scalia.

Just as Scalia voted to bypass that little thing called democracy and crown W. president, so he expressed ennui at the idea that, even if parts of the health care law are struck down, some provisions could be saved: “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?” he asked, adding: “Is this not totally unrealistic?”

Inexplicably mute 20 years after he lied his way onto the court, Clarence Thomas didn’t ask a single question during oral arguments for one of the biggest cases in the court’s history.

Dowd was White House reporter during the Senate's Thomas-Hill hearings, and wrote a ferocious attack on the front page of the October 15, 1991 Times:

The Democrats made a pass at figuring out what had happened in the case. The Republicans tried to win. While the Democrats were pronouncing themselves flummoxed by two diametrically opposed stories, the Republicans had already launched a scorched-earth strategy against Professor Hill....Just as they did in the 1988 campaign, the Republicans battered the other side by going ugly early with nasty, personal attacks, by successfully linking the Democrats with liberal advocacy groups and by using volatile images of race.