Credibility counts. And too many American institutions are demanding it without bothering to earn it.

From Business Insider via Yahoo! - 

We're watching the implosion of the Supreme Court in real time

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett admitted that the Supreme Court is crumbling as an institution.

Earlier this month, the newest justice gave a speech lamenting how the Court is viewed as partisan and warning that her fellow justices must be "hyper vigilant to make sure they're not letting personal biases creep into their decisions." She must know something we don't.

While  we're talking about the Supreme Court here, other institutions like the police and prosecutors have the same problem - they may work for society at large, but they cannot be trusted, or even have earned some trust, by society at large.

Whether it's a police officer killing an innocent person and the insisting that it was OK, DAs/CAs falsely prosecuting people on inflated charges, and then wanting money when those charges are dropped, or judges acting like partisan hacks, no matter how much one of those judges insists otherwise, there's no accountability for be unfair.

Do honest mistakes happen?

Of course.

But where the rest of us are expected to own up to our mistakes and learn from those mistakes, folks that are part of the system are never expected to be, nor do they expect to be, accountable for theirs.

And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt and assumes that many of the "mistakes" are honest ones; too many seem to be nothing more than misuses of public office.

Bottom line: Certain things are absolutely irrelevant, or should be, when someone is in contact with the "system" - age, race, gender, financial status, where someone is employed, partisan affiliation, religious choice, etc.

Until those are truly irrelevant, and seen as such by society at large, trust in the system, and the people who are part of it, won't be given.

America's enemies and those that wish to destroy it look to very happy; Cheeto may no longer be in office, but America's institutions are still imploding.