mean, showing up to pray with members of the court at key moments. and here all along alito clearly, based on what i thought was very credible information from this minister, was the one who told someone about it. and i said all along, it only made sense for the people who supported the alito decision in dobbs to leak it. because they knew, if you know the history of roberts and what he s tried to do with the court, he wants to bring them together in a narrow place of consensus. and i believe he was probably trying to do that around the mississippi law and trying to not overturn roe but rather just say the mississippi law was okay. and i think it was leaked by the right to keep him from being able to move other justices whose names appeared on that leaked opinion. i think they wanted to lock it in early so that nobody had a chance to wander before the opinion was issued. it s the only thing that makes
barrett, alito, and i think roberts have given speeches complaining about the court not being respected as it used to. i think the justices appointed by democrat presidents have tried to warn them along the way. justice sotomayor in her arguments for dobbs said the stench of doing exactly what a republican-led legislature wants us to do will be on the court. and as kim said, justice kagan has tried to warn her conservative fellow justices as well. but the conservatives do a whole lot of public complaining that people do not hold the court in high regard anymore, and it is the conservatives who have dragged public opinion according to gallup to its lowest ratings in the history of gallup asking people what they think of the supreme court. you know, i think about whining, self-pity, grievance, people who are entitled, people
were created to be sort of an answer to the federalist society and to the heritage foundation. she doesn t think that that s proper. she doesn t think that that s something that supreme court justices should do because of that appearance of impropriety, because of that appearance of conflict. so not all justices do this, but a lot of them do, including justice samuel alito, who has given speeches since the dobbs decision, acting in my opinion as some sort of christian crusader that is fighting against this alleged attack on religious rights in america when in fact religious rights, religious freedoms by the supreme court and other laws and the constitution is one of the most protected freedoms that we have. that s just a falsity. but that sort of feeds into this idea. and this idea that this reporting i agree with claire that it s very important because for years, for the better part of a decade these well-funded groups have been courting the
to be independent but it only works when that influence is not there. and you know, heilemann, senator whitehouse has been at this for a long time but never before have the exit polls showed i think what they showed. i think the first piece of exit poll data that we saw was this 60% number of everyone who voted in the midterms that disapproved of the supreme court. it s also the same number voters who disapprove of the dobbs decision pp. but do you think the political climate could force the supreme court to do something it never has ever appeared to want to do, and that s to appear to have more integrity than most americans think it does? nicolle, do you want me to be a pie-eyed optimist right now or would you like me no, i want you to be like thanksgiving week brutally honest. yeah. you know, look, if you think
think about another institutional kind of reform issue like this, like campaign finance reform, right? where if you go around america over the last 30, 40 years even before citizens united, go around and talk to people about whether they think money is corrupting in politics, whether they think there s too much money in the campaign finance system, whether they think that something s got to be done to get the influence of big business and finance, to mute their interest and not have this just be a big casino in our politics, man, i can get you very, very high on polls of people who will say damn straight, got to take care of that. and then, you know, we go to the voting booths and we vote on other things. because in a lot of cases these things feel very abstract. now, has dobbs changed that? i ll never, you know, downplay the significance of dobbs. when it first happened, i said i don t know what s going to happen here, we ve never seen anything like this before. and it had an incredib