Most of us never listen to Supreme Court arguments.

We did on Friday, however, and it wasn’t a good look. Three of the justices were spouting falsehoods and repeating long-ago debunked information on Covid as they desperately tried to gin up the panic and defend the Biden administration’s unconstitutional overreach in the OSHA vaccine mandates that could affect 80 million workers.

These justices are either stupid, lazy or liars.

Take your pick.

It was just the latest example of another once-revered American institution rife with people of underwhelming intellect willing to set aside their sworn duties in favor of a political agenda.

For many of us in the common-sense crowd, the Supreme Court was our last hope. We saw them as a steady black-robed bulwark against the hysteria that has swept the nation, leaving Americans shivering in fear and willing to offer up their basic civil liberties and trash the Constitution to protect them from a virus. 

But three justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, didn’t simply question the lawyers in the case, they vigorously defended - by spreading misinformation - the heavy-handed move to force people at little risk from the virus into vaccinations.

Sotomayor revealed herself to be something of a stumphead, either too lazy to do basic research before the hearing or getting all of her information from Joy Reid on MSNBC, when she talked about pediatric hospital admissions:

“We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

In fact, on Friday, the national pediatric Covid census - from Health and Human Services - was 3,342. Most of those children were admitted for ailments other than Covid and incidentally tested positive.

This is reminiscent of the garbage Terry McAuliffe spewed during the waning days of his campaign for governor. 

It’s one thing for a political hack to lie and exaggerate. It’s not what we expect from Supreme Court justices. Many lawyers who appear regularly in federal court expressed amazement that a justice would assert facts that were demonstrably false.

Even The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, pronounced Sotomayor’s declarations of “fact” as “wildly incorrect.”

At best Sotomayor showed herself to be a lazy justice, unprepared for one of the most important hearings of the session. At worst, she deliberately spread falsehoods to push a far-left agenda. 

Here’s another one of her  whoppers:

“…those numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did.”

Nope. Not even close. 

Kessler gave Sotomayor four Pinocchios for her performance.

“Actually, as we have shown, that’s not what the brief said. In fact, it even argued that vaccinated individuals might be more likely to catch covid rather than unvaccinated individuals. (The brief refers mainly to people with two vaccine doses as “vaccinated,” not people who also received a booster.) The brief suggests “this may be because unvaccinated, covid-recovered patients have better protection versus omicron than vaccinated patients who never previously had covid.”

Stephen Breyer, a doddering 83-year-old justice who Democrats wish would retire, joined in the fiction-a-thon claiming that there were “750 million new cases yesterday.“

Um, the population of the U.S. is only 331 million. I guess each of us caught covid twice on Thursday.

Elena Kagan took the opportunity to slam states that don’t have vaccine mandates as justification for the OSHA regulation. As if that should be a consideration in whether OSHA has exceeded its authority.

Before she wrapped up her silly arguments, Kagan muttered a profoundly disturbing view of American jurisprudence.

 “The government is paying for the medical services so they have the right to dictate details of those services,“ she blurted.

First, the government doesn’t pay for anything. Taxpayers do.

More importantly, many years ago, on Day One of my Constitutional Law class, I was taught that the government has no rights. The people have rights, the government has power, and the Constitution is there to protect those individual rights from the government.

I was a sophomore English major. Kagan was a dean of Harvard Law. Yet she mistakenly believes the government has rights. This is alarming.

How did she get on the Supreme Court with such a flawed understanding of our constitutional republic? 

A better question is how did Sotomayor get there?