Caffeinated Politics

This weekend, two recent news stories bounced about in my mind. Both were examples that underscore the rot in our current political climate and governing institutions. I do not wish to be puritanical in my delivery in this column, but can we agree that there was a time when certain lines were not crossed, but now we seem to be dashing past those lines all too often? Last week, a Supreme Court justice whined from the bench because he didn’t like being called out, and a former cabinet secretary was forced to spend a night away from his four‑year‑old twins because an anonymous stranger weaponized the child‑protection system for politics.

So yes, there is a rot that needs to be discussed.

At the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito managed to turn what should have been an ordinary court moment into something closer to an unscripted moment on a news panel show. He made an unprecedented, testy exchange from the bench following the reading of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in an immigration case. Visibly frustrated, Alito said, “There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read.” The Supreme Court’s public information office later confirmed that Sotomayor’s chambers had notified him in advance. His off-the-cuff complaint was shallow and broke a standard that has long existed on the bench.

The Court’s spokesperson later tried to mop up the Alito mess, but here is the thing. Even at the highest court in the land, where decorum is supposed to be baked into the marble, one of the nine felt entitled to treat a colleague’s dissent like a personal slight and answer it as if it were an AM-radio call-in show with a conservative host.

If you zoom out, however, Alito’s burst of pique fits neatly into a broader pattern. We’ve normalized public officials who treat disagreement as an insult, who respond to criticism not with argument but with grievance. Now, where would that type of behavior have been learned over the past decade?

The Supreme Court used to be the place where that style stopped; now it’s just another stage. When a justice can roll his eyes at a colleague’s Holocaust‑inflected warning about extinguishing the “light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty” and then publicly complain that he didn’t get enough time to spin his own narrative, we are not watching a clash of legal philosophies but instead the erosion of basic civic manners.

Decency took a different type of hit in Traverse City, Michigan. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, considered by many as a likely Democratic contender for the 2028 presidential race, opened his front door to find a state police officer and a Child Protective Services worker informing him that an anonymous report claimed he was a danger to his four‑year‑old twins. The allegation, according to Buttigieg’s own Substack essay, stated a caller claimed Buttigieg had once confessed “unspeakable violent crimes” to a woman at a conference in Alabama, a town he says he has never even visited.

Because the machinery of child protection cannot simply shrug off a report, even a ridiculous one, Buttigieg and his husband Chasten were told their children would have to undergo forensic interviews and that he should not be alone with them until those interviews were complete. The twins went to stay with their grandparents; Buttigieg spent twenty‑four hours separated from his kids, describing the period as “among the darkest hours of my life” and admitting he was “furious” that someone had “decided to hurt our family this week.” Michigan State Police later confirmed the report was false and said they believed it was politically motivated, a form of “swatting”.

The indecency was the Alabama woman who made the false claim. The indecency was the willingness to drag two preschoolers into a fabricated horror story because their father is a gay public figure who posts Father’s Day photos and might run for president. It’s the cold, vile, bigoted calculation that even when the allegation is quickly disproven, the emotional damage will linger. Buttigieg, who has already lived through death threats, rocket attacks in war, and the usual bile aimed at LGBTQ+ officials, called this “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.” That’s not just a personal response to the situation he encountered, but I suggest it is clearly a diagnosis of where our politics has gone.

We like to tell ourselves that American politics has always been rough, and that’s true enough. But there is a difference between sharp elbows and deliberate cruelty. There is a difference between calling someone wrong and trying to get their children taken away. There is a difference between a justice writing an opinion you despise and a justice publicly sulking because a colleague dared to read her dissent in full. The through‑line in both stories is the same. There is a sickening culture that increasingly treats other people’s dignity as expendable collateral in the endless war for clicks, power, and ideological victory.

But you know what also makes me complain about this? We are encouraged to just move on and forget about these stories. The Alito‑Sotomayor exchange is already being filed under “misunderstanding”. Buttigieg’s ordeal is being slotted into the growing category of “political swatting”.

Saturday morning, I took a yellow leg pad and a pen with my coffee to the front lawn. I jotted down lines and made a few mental notes. I wrote my first paragraph, which was meant to sum up where I wanted to start this column. I think it actually makes for a better summation, instead.

Decency, at its core, is not complicated. It’s the refusal to use children as weapons. It’s the discipline to let a colleague’s dissent stand without turning the bench into a rebuttal podium. It’s the basic recognition that your opponent is a human being with a family, not just a character in your favorite culture‑war storyline. When a justice can’t muster that discipline, and when a faceless caller can’t muster that recognition, the problem isn’t just them. Rather, it’s the ecosystem that rewards their behavior, amplifies their grievance, and shrugs at the damage.