We’re now into the “bonus” day which is going to find me wandering round the north side of the Mall starting at the Supreme Court and Capitol Hill and then working my way down the Mall toward the White House.
I will say that finding Weihle-Reston East station via the surface streets does still tend to be a bit more of a miss than hit…today I missed a turn and ended up overshooting Weihle-Reston East by about five miles.
I ended up finding the Spring Hill station which is a bit closer to DC but the parking looked sketchy at best so I figured I’d work my way back toward Reston. Along the way, I accidentally found Wolf Trap Amphitheatre in the void between Tyson’s Corner and Reston so it’s handy knowing where it is now…I’d seen signs for it on the I-495 Beltway but figured it much closer to the Beltway than it actually is.
But even with the detour, it’s a happy bonus that parking is free on the weekends and a train was still waiting in the station so I could just walk on without waiting on the platform.
Checking in on the Metro app, I encountered my first service interruption due to escalator work at the Capitol South station that is the closest Metro station to the Supreme Court. Fortunately, there was a van at Federal Centre SW station to drop us off at the entry of Capitol South and then it was a pretty easy walk the rest of the way to the Supreme Court.
A Supreme Court that looks quite a bit different than the last time I was here.
Oh, the building is the same impressive marble edifice it was before but owing to the protests after the release of the Dobbs decision striking down a woman’s right to abortion, the entire building is surrounded by a cage barricade.
That’s why the featured image for this BLOG post is arguably my favourite from the trip.
The protestors have long since left but the radicalised majority of justices on the Supreme Court find themselves in a jail of their own creation by letting their religious and political beliefs get in the way of preserving and protecting the Constitution that they are supposed to with the cases that are argued before them.
“My point is, who are you people? You’ve transformed this court from being a governmental branch devoted to civil rights and liberties into a protector of discrimination, a guardian of government, a slave to monied interests and big business and today, hallelujah, you seek to kill a mentally disabled man.”
Alan Shore, “Boston Legal” — “The Court Supreme”
That withering criticism was written many years before the current Court was pushed even further to the right with the appointees of former President Trump. If anything, they’ve gotten far worse if their decisions in the NC gerrymandering cases (in which they admitted a hyperpartisan gerrymander existed but they had no power to do anything about it) and the Dobbs decision are anything to go by.
May the day come swiftly that they tear down their ideological cage and return to the days when precedent actually meant something…and so did the Constitution, for that matter.
After spending quite a bit of time just taking in the Supreme Court, I wandered round the north side of the Capitol (the side housing the Senate which under former Majority Leader McConnell is more than a little complicit in the Court’s current partisan ideological split) to the Mall where you can still see where the repairs were taking place on the side of the Capitol damaged during the violence of the insurrection on 06 Jan 2021.
