美国最高法院正在失去其正当性 The Politicization of the Supreme Court Is Eroding Its Legitimacy

 

美国最高法院正在失去其正当性

The Politicization of the Supreme Court Is Eroding Its Legitimacy

“Legitimacy is for losers,” a political scientist once said. It’s a profound concept. The winning side in a decision will gladly accept it without asking why. But the losing side — whether the decision is made by a basketball referee or the Supreme Court — will accept defeat only if they believe the decision was made fairly and by the book.

“正当性是为失败者准备的，”一位政治学家曾说。这是一个深刻的概念。在裁决中获胜的一方会很高兴地接受它，不会去问原因。但失败的一方——无论该裁决是由篮球裁判还是最高法院做出——只有在他们相信裁决公平且符合规定的情况下，才会坦然接受失败。

That’s why the politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court is so alarming. People on the losing end of Supreme Court decisions increasingly feel that justice is not being served. That’s a scary situation for the high court, and for American democracy in general.

正因如此，美国最高法院的政治化令人担忧。在最高法院的裁决中，失败一方的人们越来越感到正义没有得到伸张。这对最高法院和整个美国民主来说是一个可怕的局面。

“The Supreme Court has no power to enforce its decisions,” Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me on Friday. “It doesn’t have an army. The only thing it has power to do is write PDFs and put them up on its website.”

“最高法院没有权力执行其决定，”华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校的法学教授丹尼尔·埃普斯上周五告诉我。“它没有军队。它唯一有权力做的事情就是写PDF文件，并把它们放在自己的网站上。”

All the Supreme Court really has to go on is the public’s acceptance of its rulings as legitimate. “Once you lose that, it’s not really clear what the stopping point is,” Epps said. “I see that as a fundamental threat to society.”

最高法院真正需要依靠的是让公众接受其裁决是正当的。“一旦失去了它，那什么都有可能发生，”埃普斯说。“我认为这是对社会的根本威胁。”

Epps is right. By one economic theory, the choice of whether to obey the law is like any other decision, a weighing of costs and benefits. But you know from personal experience that’s not true. There are plenty of times you could have lied, cheated or stolen with impunity. You did the right thing anyway because you more or less accepted the legitimacy of the laws, how they were enacted and how the people who enacted them were selected.

埃普斯是正确的。根据一种经济学理论，是否遵守法律的选择就像任何其他决定一样，是对成本和收益的权衡。但是通过个人经历，你就知道事实并非如此。很多时候，你可以撒谎、欺骗或偷窃而不受惩罚。但你还是做了正确的事，因为你或多或少接受了法律的正当性，接受了法律是如何制定，以及制定法律的人是如何被选出的。

I’m not going to delve into the substance of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. I’ll only point out that those on the losing side weren’t just disappointed. Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor went way beyond that, flatly stating in their dissent that the majority’s decision “undermines the court’s legitimacy.”

我不打算深入探讨周五最高法院在多布斯诉杰克逊妇女健康组织案中裁决的实质部分——该裁决推翻了罗诉韦德案。我只想指出，失败者不仅仅是感到失望。大法官史蒂芬·布雷耶、埃琳娜·卡根和索尼娅·索托马约尔的感受远不止于此，他们在反对意见中明确表示，多数大法官的裁决“损害了法院的正当性”。

Sotomayor was even blunter in oral arguments in December. “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” she asked, before answering her own question: “I don’t see how it is possible.” Sadly, saying so out loud also undermines the court’s legitimacy.

索托马约尔在12月的口头辩论中更是直言不讳。“如果公众认为宪法及其解读只是政治行为，这个机构是否能够顶着这种恶臭生存下来？”然后她自己做出了回答：“我不认为这是可能的。”可悲的是，这样公开说出来，也是在损害法院的正当性。

For the losing side, the sting of the decision was made worse by the events that led to it. In 2016, Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, blocked a vote on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, defending his action on the grounds that the nomination came just eight months before that year’s presidential election. But in 2020 McConnell hurried through President Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, with the final confirmation vote coming just a week before that year’s election. That got Republicans what they wanted but tore a hole in the fabric of democracy.

对于失败的一方来说，导致该裁决的事件令其更加令人痛苦。2016年，时任参议院多数党领袖米奇·麦康奈尔阻止了就奥巴马总统的最高法院大法官提名梅里克·加兰德的表决，他说这么做的理由是该提名距离当年的总统选举只有八个月。但在2020年，麦康奈尔加紧通过了特朗普总统对艾米·康尼·巴雷特的提名，最终确认投票就在当年选举的前一周进行。这让共和党人得到了他们想要的东西，但民主的建筑却被砸出一个窟窿。

In 2018, before the Senate vote on his Supreme Court nomination, Brett Kavanaugh worked hard to persuade Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, that he was no threat to Roe v. Wade. “Roe is 45 years old, it has been reaffirmed many times, lots of people care about it a great deal, and I’ve tried to demonstrate I understand real-world consequences,” he said in a meeting with Collins, according to notes kept by staff members, adding: “I am a don’t-rock-the-boat kind of judge. I believe in stability and in the Team of Nine.” Collins now says she feels she was misled.

2018年，在参议院就其最高法院提名进行投票之前，布雷特·卡瓦诺努力说服缅因州共和党参议员苏珊·柯林斯，他不会对罗诉韦德案构成威胁。“罗案的裁决已经有45年历史，它被多次重申，很多人非常关心它，我试图证明我理解现实世界的后果，”工作人员保存的笔记显示他在与柯林斯会面时说。他还说：“我是一个不破坏现状的法官。我相信稳定，相信‘九人团队’。”如今，柯林斯说，她觉得自己被误导了。

The Supreme Court in some ways resembles the Federal Reserve. Its decision makers are unelected technocrats who use arcane methods and vocabularies (“stare decisis” for the court, “zero lower bound” for the Fed). The obscurity of what they do makes it all the more important for the public to trust that whatever is happening behind the curtain is on the up and up. Yet in the latest Gallup poll data, only 25 percent of Americans polled in the weeks before Dobbs said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the Supreme Court. That was a new low in nearly 50 years of polling.

最高法院在某些方面类似于美联储。它的决策者都是不经选举产生的技术官僚，他们使用晦涩难懂的方法和词汇（最高法院使用“遵循先例”，美联储使用“零利率下限”）。他们所做的事情晦涩难懂，这使得公众更加需要相信，无论幕后发生了什么，都是光明正大的。然而，最新的盖洛普民意调查数据显示，在多布斯案之前的几周，接受调查的美国人中，只有25%的人表示，他们对最高法院有很大或相当大的信心。这创下了近50年来民意调查的新低。

There is no one on the court today like Justice Anthony Kennedy, who, despite being a Republican appointee, was independent and often unpredictable in his jurisprudence, Epps said. Kennedy retired in 2018. “The screening is far more rigorous” now than when Kennedy joined the court in 1988, so a freethinker such as he would never get on the bench, Epps said.

埃普斯说，如今的最高法院中，没有人能像安东尼·肯尼迪大法官那样，尽管他是由共和党任命的，但他是独立的，他的判例往往是不可预测的。肯尼迪于2018年退休。埃普斯说，与肯尼迪1988年加入最高法院时相比，现在“筛选要严格得多”，因此像他这样的自由思想者不可能坐上最高法院的法官席。

Of the Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court, only Chief Justice John Roberts seems greatly concerned with preserving the impression that the court is apolitical. In the Dobbs case he voted with the majority in upholding a Mississippi law restricting abortion but said he would have taken “a more measured course,” stopping short of overruling Roe outright.

在共和党任命的大法官中，只有首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨似乎非常注重维护最高法院不涉政治的印象。在多布斯案中，他投票支持密西西比限制堕胎的法律，但表示他会采取“更慎重的做法”，而不是直接推翻罗案判决。

The Dobbs decision came one day after the Supreme Court struck down New York’s limit on carrying guns outside the home. In Dobbs, the court upheld states’ rights to restrict their citizens’ behavior, while in the New York case it did the opposite. That may appear inconsistent to supporters of abortion rights, but it’s precisely what the average Republican voter wants, said Maya Sen, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School.

就在多布斯案裁决的前一天，最高法院推翻了纽约州对在家宅之外携带枪支的限制。在多布斯案中，最高法院支持各州限制公民行为的权利，而在纽约案中却恰恰相反。哈佛大学肯尼迪学院教授玛雅·森说，这在堕胎权的支持者看来可能是前后不一致的，但这正是普通共和党选民所希望的。

“We take as a given that political actors will want a judiciary that serves their interests,” said Sen, who is the co-author with Adam Bonica of a 2020 book, “The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary.” “For many Republicans this is a day of celebration, of victory,” she said.

森与亚当·博尼卡在2020年合著了《司法拉锯战——律师、政治家和意识形态激励如何塑造美国司法》(The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary)一书。她说：“对许多共和党人来说，这是一个庆祝胜利的日子。”

It was James Gibson, a colleague of Epps at Washington University who is an expert on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, who coined the “legitimacy is for losers” phrase. In a chapter in a 2015 book, he wrote: “Institutions do not require legitimacy when they are pleasing people with their policies. Legitimacy becomes crucial in the context of dissatisfaction.”

“正当性是为失败者准备的”这句话是埃普斯在华盛顿大学的同事、最高法院正当性问题专家詹姆斯·吉布森提出的。在2015年出版的一本书中，他写道：“机构的政策令人满意时并不需要正当性。在令人们不满时，正当性才变得至关重要。”

Really, then, legitimacy isn’t just for losers. It’s for the court itself.

实际上，正当性其实并非只是为

来源：nyt