You wouldn’t believe how popular this sentiment is on the right-wing/New Age side of the internet. It’s bullshit.

Regulation isn’t free. It costs money to compel for-profit companies to comply with the rules that benefit them in the long run, but cost in the short run. Conservatives don’t like that, and want to be free to ignore, for instance, conservation regulations (I know, it’s sad that conservatives don’t like conservation). Now the Supreme Court is getting into the act.

On New England fishing boats, cramming another person into a space that barely fits a half-dozen employees already is a big ask. But the National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Commerce, requires that herring fisheries notify it before embarking on fishing trips, and on half of such trips, a federal inspector rides along. The inspector checks the crew’s compliance with federal rules about where they can fish, how many of which types of fish they can catch, and what kind of gear they can use in the process. The rule also requires that companies help foot the bill for its inspectors’ salaries—about $710 a day. Fishery owners say this reduces their annual returns by about 20 percent.

Last year, four fisheries challenging the rule asked the Supreme Court to put a stop to this practice. And last week, the Court granted certiorari in the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The justices will hear oral argument sometime next fall.

You can trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing, right? Ha ha, no. The Supreme Court doesn’t believe in science.

The Supreme Court is one of the most scientifically illiterate bodies in government, but why don’t we let it take over federal regulation? That is the basic question behind Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, scheduled for argument next month at the Supreme Court, and it should scare you. To those only recently paying attention, the court’s disdain for the scientific consensus, as evidenced in cases like West Virginia v. EPA, may seem surprising. However, even before the installation of its conservative supermajority, the court had long viewed scientific evidence that runs contrary to its policy preferences with contempt.

Skepticism of an inconvenient scientific consensus is nothing new for the Supreme Court, particularly for the conservatives. In Stanford v. Kentucky, the 1989 case on the constitutionality of capital punishment for 16- and 17-year-olds, Justice William Brennan pointed out the conservative majority’s “evident but misplaced disdain” for scientific evidence, particularly that of the social sciences. In Lockhart v. McCree, Justice William Rehnquist took it upon himself to disregard 14 of 15 submitted peer-reviewed studies, stating that the only reliable study happened to be the one that supported his position, contrary to the scientific consensus. Chief Justice John Roberts has gone so far as to call certain fields “sociological gobbledygook.”

Conservatives’ dislike of science does not stop at social sciences, though. In recent years, conservative justices have made statements completely at odds with the scientific consensus, including saying that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and taking the position that a surface connection between navigable waters is necessary for pollution of wetlands to matter. There is a strong scientific consensus contrary to each of these contentions, but the conservative justices chose to disregard it in favor of their prior opinions.

This is what happens when you let theocrats pack the courts. The only laws they’ll accept are the ones they’ve invented for themselves. You may recall this notorious quote.

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]

That’s the law of the land now.

I know it’s hard to believe, but George Santos has been expelled from congress.

By a vote of 311-114, the House voted to expel Santos, with 206 Democrats and 105 Republicans voting for expulsion, and two Democrats and 112 Republicans voting against it. This was just the sixth time in U.S. history that the House has expelled one of its own and the first time the House has done so without a criminal conviction, though Santos doesn’t dispute that he lied about most of his resume. (He does, however, dispute that he broke the law, despite the 23 criminal counts against him and substantial evidence in his indictment—as well as an Ethics report released two weeks ago—that detailed a number of alleged legal violations.)

As members voted on Santos’ removal, the serial fabulist was in and out of the chamber, at one point leaving, and then reappearing with his coat draped over his shoulders to watch the finally tally and shake hands with certain members.

It is revealing, though, that lying on your CV and misappropriating campaign funds can get you expelled, but enabling pedophiles and committing statutory rape, as people like Jordan and Gaetz have done, doesn’t even get you a slap on the wrist, and the ethical standards of the Supreme Court are a joke. It’s the money that matters.