Since a few people have asked, let’s unpack why this Dersh assertion is so fatuous, so probative of his status as a cable say-anything-for-screentime performer rather than a serious legal commentator, shall we? /1

/2 Magical thinking about the Supreme Court is fairly common rhetoric. You see it in the frequent assertion “we will take this case all the way to the Supreme Court.” But it’s more common recently for ideological reasons — we saw tons of it in the Trump-election-challenge era.

/3 That’s because Trumpists cast SCOTUS as the last reliable “real American” institution in a country overwhelmed by the Evil Democrat Horde. SCOTUS did not comply with this vision of its role because SCOTUS conservative =/= “Bill Gates vaccine has microchips” conservative.

/4 SCOTUS refused even to take up, much less overturn, most of the “SCOTUS will fix this liberal atrocity” magical thinking cases, because that’s not what SCOTUS does. It takes VERY few cases, and of those, almost none are “this outcome makes me mad.”

/5 SCOTUS takes cases with controversial LEGAL disputes - disputes about what the law is, not about application of that law to particular facts. They take “does defendant have right X,” or “how broad is right X”, not “did these facts violate well-established right X.”

/6 There are exceptions — some death penalty cases come to mind. And sometimes there are politically fraught cases that seem like odd choices. But generally SCOTUS does not take up “trial of the century” criminal cases just because they are notorious.

/7 Nothing about the Chauvin case lends itself to SCOTUS review. The legal test for his argument about unfair publicity is not in doubt. The standard of review for applying that test to the facts is abuse of discretion, which is not the sort of thing that SCOTUS likes to review.

/8 in short, the suggestion that SCOTUS will vindicate Chauvin — at all, let alone on this issue — is simply not grounded in reality. It’s pure opinion porn. It’s not to be taken seriously.