Collegiality for collegiality's sake

Steve Vladeck's latest Substack (paywalled) discusses Justice Kagan's remarks at the Ninth Circuit Conference. With respect to collegiality, Steve quotes Kagan and writes the following:

Third, and in a similar vein, in responses to questions about how the justices are getting along internally, Justice Kagan pivoted to a response about why the answer shouldn’t matter that much to the public—not because collegiality is unimportant, but because the issue isn’t whether the justices are friendly; it’s whether their relationships influence their colleagues. As she put it:

“I can’t imagine why the public should care if we go to the opera together, or we can talk about baseball together. What the public should care about is … if the collegiality brings about a certain kind of decision-making process. In other words, if it leads to people listening to each other in talking about the law and in talking about cases and making decisions. If it leads to people being able to step into each other’s shoes and see the world through another person’s eyes or see certain legal issues through a different perspective.

Again, I think there’s some nuance here. The point is not, as some accounts reported it, that the justices’ collegiality is unimportant; it’s that it’s important as means to an end—with a subtle insinuation that there isn’t enough of that kind of camaraderie on the Court today.

I made a similar point years ago when people complained that President Obama and Speaker John Boehner could not sit down and have a beer, comparing them unfavorably with the Scalia/Ginsburg safaris and opera trips. I pointed out that this friendship rarely convinced either person to switch a position or compromise--which is what everyone wanted from Obama and Boehner. We do not want collegiality on multi-member bodies for its own sake, but as a means to a better-functioning multi-member body. (With Kagan pushing the ideal of empathy that Obama proposed but never defended). Media coverage of politics and the Court (stuck in a Sorkin-esque vortex of wanting everyone to get along and agree with one another) cannot see past the former.