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Praying With Supreme Court Justices And Then Cited By A Supreme Court Justice. Hmmmmm....

File this under 'more evidence America is a theocracy.'

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prayer Memorial day, veterans day. Male hands folded in prayer, holding a rosary. The American flag is in the background. The concept amerikanskih holidays and religionThe executive director at Liberty Counsel, an evangelical organization, was caught in a hot mic moment with a YouTube livestreamer boasting about her access to certain Supreme Court justices. Peggy Nienaber can be heard in the clip gleefully bragging not only that her organization is able to pray with members of the Court, but that they’re invited inside the courthouse to do so. “We’re the only people who do that,” she notes.

Rolling Stone details the conversation between Nienaber and the livestreamer:

[Nienaber] spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip.

She also claims that there was one of these prayer meetings on the Monday after Roe was overturned.

Listen, justices can pray with whoever they want. But it’s clear from the clip the access to the unelected yet supremely powerful figures is the allure.

Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, denies that these prayer meetings happen.

“It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”

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But Rob Schenck, the founder of Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital which was absorbed by Liberty Counsel in 2018, told Rolling Stone he did just that in his time with the organization:

Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)

To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.

But adding an ethical dilemma to the practice, Liberty Counsel regularly files amicus briefs with the Court. Indeed, Samuel Alito cited their brief in his Dobbs opinion. Law professor Louis Virelli puts none too fine a point on the practice, noting, “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court is a problem.”

But don’t worry, there aren’t actually any ethical standards Supreme Court justices are held to.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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