Some lawyers are principled; some are not. More to the point: we can think that there is often a right answer, or at least better and worse answers, to the question: what does this law mean? This is one reason why I loathe the recent immunity decision: it's a horrible misreading of the Constitution.
I have very well meaning, impressively educated liberal friends who think justices are abundantly principled and that laws are real, as opposed to what the blatantly obvious truth is which is: “a lawyer is someone who you can ask to get you somewhere, and they can find out a way to do it…”
And it's really important that judges act in such a way as to make this belief reasonable. If they could just make up whatever they wanted -- "When the Constitution says that a President must be 35 years old, I interpret '35' to mean '9' -- there would be no such thing as the rule of law.
Congress could pass "laws", and the President could sign them, but then the Courts could just interpret them to mean literally anything. They could then change their minds ('overturn precedent') whenever it led to results they did not like.
That would really be dictatorship by unelected judges.
If we want to preserve our Republic, we cannot just say that the law is whatever the Supreme Court says it is, and no interpretation of it is better than any other. We have to think: there is such a thing as the meaning of a law, which judges try to work out.
This is consistent with thinking that sometimes it's hard to tell what that meaning is. It's *often* hard to make ordinary terms precise (quick: how far away from you does something have to be in order no longer to count as 'close'?) But that does not prevent us from making ourselves clear enough.
Likewise, some parts of the Constitution are absolutely clear enough for us to say what they mean. (The President has to be 35 years old, and 'years' does not, in this context, mean 'dog years' or 'years on Mercury' or any such thing.)
Some parts are plainly ambiguous (what makes a punishment 'cruel and unusual'? And what rights exactly does the 9th Amendment guarantee?) Some are in between. Judges need to interpret them as best they can. They will be biased, but that does not mean that they should just throw up their hands.
We should never, EVER just accept that judges can do whatever they want. That's just accepting tyranny. We should always insist that they do their best to INTERPRET the law, not create it. We can do this even if we realize that perfection in this regard is not possible.
/Fin.
There's a second problem in that the Constitution, being so hard to amend, doesn't cover current situations. This leaves the courts, especially the Supreme Court, with a huge amount of latitude that it probably shouldn't have.
Sometimes it does: 'the press' is easily construed to cover internet publications. Sometimes it would if the Justices read it accurately (2nd Amendment.)
This is a particularly malevolent effect of the Loper Bright decision. Any undefined term like “including” “enables” “receives” etc will be found vague despite many decades of use by federal agencies to protect Americans. “Congress will then need to clarify” would be laughable were it not so cruel.
