There’s no right to fairness

Regarding Paul Waldman’s March 6 op-ed, “Conservatives turn ‘fairness’ upside down”:

Three Supreme Court justices hearing the challenge to the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — interrupted oral arguments to essentially ask: Is the program fair? Others who had paid off their loans didn’t get this break. Their “fairness” questions suggested another question they didn’t plan to ask: Does the court decide cases on political grounds?

The term “fairness” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. No textualist or disciple of original intent can take comfort there. The three justices use the term quite sparingly. Fairness never passed their lips when deciding whether a state could compel a 12-year-old girl to carry her pregnancy to term. Nor was fairness a component of the court’s decision not to stay the execution of Donald Dillbeck, born mentally impaired from fetal alcohol syndrome, despite a prior decision of the court holding it unconstitutional to execute someone with a mental disability. I doubt we will ever see the word “fairness” as a governing principle in any opinion of the court.

Robert T. Hall, Sterling