I & I Editorial BoardIf you want to understand the difference between the political left and right, just look at how each side has treated the Supreme Court.
For decades, conservatives grumbled about liberal justices on the court and the judicial activism they engineered in rulings such as Roe v. Wade. Justices, conservatives said, are supposed to interpret the law, not make it. They spent years articulating and defending this principle, and educating and supporting judges who thought likewise.
And for decades, conservatives tried to get Republicans elected president in hopes (which were often dashed) that they would restore judicial balance to the court.
That campaign finally paid off when President Donald Trump was able to name three justices in his first term –- one who replaced “centrist” Anthony Kennedy and the other filling the seat vacated by liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The result has been a string of court victories for those who believe the Constitution means what it says, including the lifting of the 50-year plague on the court known as Roe v. Wade, weakening the administrative state, protecting gun rights, ending race-based college admissions, supporting religious liberty, etc.
That doesn’t mean the right is happy with every decision the court has made since. We published a guest commentary in these pages that attacked George W. Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts for siding with liberals on birthright citizenship and election integrity cases this term, saying “Roberts cobbles a majority canoodling with the court’s radical leftists whenever he is scared witless of being ousted from the popular girls’ table of elite opinionmakers.” (There have been other disappointments along the way.)
But while conservatives railed against such rulings, they didn’t stoop so low as to attack the integrity of the court itself.
Now look at how the left has reacted once it lost its decades-long Supreme Court majority.
It embarked on a sustained campaign to attack the court itself and threaten justices who didn’t rule its way.
In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood on the Supreme Court steps when it was deliberating an abortion case and said before a crowd of protesters: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Even the liberal USA Today editorial page was appalled, saying it “warrants a full-throated apology.” (Schumer never issued one.)
While the court was deliberating the Dobbs case, a draft ruling was leaked, protesters camped out in front of conservative justices’ houses, and the threats of assassination were very real.
The left also enlisted the mainstream media to push bogus scandal stories to impeach the integrity of conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito – the latter of whom was targeted after his wife flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag.
When Joe Biden won in 2024, Democrats immediately started pushing to pack the court with liberals. Biden later appointed a presidential commission to study “reforms” and in his last year in office pitched a plan that amounted to court packing by another name. It would, wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Adam J. White at the time, “strip current justices of their constitutional responsibilities and transfer those powers to successors, one justice at a time, beginning with Justice Clarence Thomas … If anything, the new proposals for disempowering ‘senior’ justices are even more aggressive than the original version of court-packing.”
Biden justified this abomination by saying that “It’s not hyperbole to suggest Trump is literally an existential threat, an existential threat to the very Constitution of democracy we, we say we care about.”
The Democratic Socialists who are quickly taking over the party want to eliminate the Supreme Court altogether.
This week, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Angry at the Supreme Court, liberals push a slew of plans for overhauling it.”
It says “The latest wave of proposals to overhaul the Supreme Court have reached something of a fever pitch over the past few months, as Democrats grow increasingly frustrated with the court’s rightward turn,” and that “Democrats’ anger is fueled by a conviction that many of these rulings are more about politics than the law.”
It goes on to talk about Democrats’ “dismay,” their “fresh fury,” the Court’s “appalling record,” the “five-alarm fire,” and the “crisis that we face on the highest court in this country.”
That’s the sort of emotionally loaded language used by the left whenever it loses, and why it should keep losing.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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Johnny Kampis
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