The Left Declares War on the Supreme Court

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The United States Supreme Court is today’s most important institutional guardian of America’s constitutional republic, which the Left seeks to destroy. In recent years, for example, the Court majority has defended core constitutional values pertaining to separation of powers, government accountability to the people, freedom of speech, and free exercise of religious beliefs. Such decisions are anathema to left-wing progressives. Therefore, it should be no surprise that the Left is waging war against the Supreme Court to transform it into the equivalent of a pliable, progressive-dominated third legislative chamber.

The Left has proposed radical overhauls of the Supreme Court, which include packing the Court with progressive justices and setting term limits for the justices even though the Constitution states that they “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” Leftists have also used spurious ethics and conflict-of-interest accusations against conservative justices to delegitimize the current Supreme Court. It is another arrow in the leftists’ quiver to justify their calls for extreme changes to smooth the way for their progressive agenda.

Some left-wing activists have taken more direct action by conducting disruptive demonstrations outside of the homes of conservative justices aimed at intimidating them. These demonstrations began after the disclosure of a leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The police arrested a man before he was able to carry out his alleged plan to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer legitimized the Left’s militancy against the Supreme Court back in 2020 at a pro-abortion rally when he threatened Justices Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch on the steps of the Supreme Court: “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 you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

President Biden displayed the Left’s animus against the Supreme Court with his own harsh language demonizing the Supreme Court for decisions that did not jibe with his preferred progressive outcome. In June 2023, for example, he described the Supreme Court as “not a normal court.” During a speech last July, Mr. Biden said that the “extreme opinions” handed down by the Court “have undermined law and established civil rights principles and protections.” He has since proposed so-called Court “reforms” including term limits for Supreme Court justices, which he should know from his time serving as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee would require a constitutional amendment to enact.

Contrary to the Left’s caricature of the Supreme Court as a bastion of right-wing extremism, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously during its 2023-2024 term in 48 percent of its cases. These unanimous decisions included, for example, one that threw out a lawsuit seeking to roll back access to an abortion drug, mifepristone. In another case, the three liberal justices joined their six conservative colleagues in ruling unanimously against states’ attempts to bar Donald Trump from running in their states for the presidency. All nine justices rejected Colorado’s argument that Mr. Trump was ineligible to have his name included on its presidential ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection clause.

Other cases were decided by majorities comprised of liberal and conservative justices. One example was the Court’s reversal of a lower court ruling that had imposed major restrictions on the ability of Biden administration officials’ ability to communicate with social media companies about their content moderation policies.

Among the fifty-eight opinions argued last term, just eleven resulted in a 6-3 vote along ideological lines.

The Supreme Court rulings decided by a 6-3 conservative majority that have most infuriated President Biden and the Democratic Party’s left-wing base were those that upheld core constitutional principles under attack by the Left. Their fury has nothing to do with the rule of law that they accuse the conservative majority of undermining. The Left is upset that strict constitutionalists on the Supreme Court are protecting the rule of law against the Left’s wrecking ball.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade and returned the abortion issue to the people’s elected officials to resolve, inflamed the Left, including President Biden. The president claimed that the decision was “a realization of an extreme ideology” and “a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view.” President Biden even attacked the third independent branch of the U.S. government on foreign soil for rendering a judicial decision with which he disagreed.

The Dobbs decision overturned a fundamentally flawed precedent that had created a new constitutional right to abortion out of whole cloth. “Without any grounding in the constitutional text, history, or precedent, it imposed on the entire country a detailed set of rules much like those that one might expect to find in a statute or regulation,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.

The Dobbs decision did no more than reaffirm the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Although noting that a woman’s decision to have an abortion involved ending an unborn human life, the Dobbs majority decision did not outlaw abortion or severely restrict it. The Supreme Court’s ruling simply ordered that “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the peo­ple and their elected representatives” to work through the myriad public policy issues that abortion entails.

The Left’s war against the Supreme Court over the Dobbs decision exposes the Left’s disdain for the people’s will, as expressed through their elected representatives.

Another 6-3 Supreme Court conservative majority decision (303 Creative LLC v. Elenis) that infuriated the Left involved freedom of speech. This fundamental freedom enshrined in the First Amendment includes the freedom to refuse governmental authorities’ directives to express views that contradict an individual’s deeply held beliefs. The Court held that the First Amendment protected a website designer from being forced to create a customized website, which conveyed a message embodying her own expressive content celebrating same-sex weddings that violated her fundamental religious beliefs.

President Biden and LGBTQ+ activists who are part of his progressive base completely distorted the Supreme Court’s holding. “In America, no person should face discrimination simply because of who they are or who they love,” President Biden said. “The Supreme Court’s disappointing decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis undermines that basic truth.”

Contrary to the Left’s demagoguery, the majority opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch did not approve of discrimination against gay people because of who they are or who they love. Rather, it simply upheld the First Amendment right of free speech, which includes an individual’s right not to be compelled by government edict to express views contrary to his or her own core beliefs. “The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “not as the government demands.”

A third landmark decision handed down by the Supreme Court – also by an ideologically divided 6-3 majority vote – dealt with the fundamental constitutional principle of separation of powers. The case (Biden v. Nebraska) involved an executive order that President Biden issued, which unilaterally authorized the cancellation of students’ obligations to pay off at least a portion of their higher education student debt. The Supreme Court intervened and struck down President Biden’s unconstitutional trampling upon Congress’s legislative authority to appropriate the taxpayers’ money under Article I of the Constitution.

Releasing forty-three million borrowers from their obligations to repay $430 billion in student loans, which would transfer those obligations to the taxpayers, raises policy issues of nationwide significance that are up to the legislative branch to resolve. “The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “The dissent is correct that this is a case about one branch of government arrogating to itself power belonging to another. But it is the Executive seizing the power of the Legislature.”

Under America’s system of separation of powers and checks and balances, it is ultimately up to the independent judicial branch to interpret the limits imposed by the Constitution on the powers of the two political branches. That is precisely what the Supreme Court did by striking down President Biden’s executive order that unilaterally transferred student debt obligations to American taxpayers, including those who already paid off their loans or did not go to college.

Instead of complying with the limitations that the Supreme Court imposed on his executive power to unilaterally cancel student debt, President Biden doubled down and rolled out new student debt cancellation programs worth billions of dollars. After abusing his executive power by usurping legislative authority that belongs to Congress, Biden compounded the abuse of his executive power by contemptuously ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling. He thereby trampled upon the independent authority of the third separate branch in the Constitution’s design of the federal government, the judicial branch.

The Left was all in. They attacked the Supreme Court for getting in the way of one of its favorite give-away programs, which President Biden tried to enact without congressional approval.

“The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court, which is what we are seeing now,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said in response to the Court’s student debt cancellation ruling and other decisions. She claimed that the Supreme Court was “expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress,” which is precisely the opposite of what the Court did in its Biden v. Nebraska decision. The majority decision focused on protecting the authority of the legislative branch from encroachments by a power-hungry president and his bureaucrats.

AOC’s “fix” is to highjack the Court by packing it with progressive justices.

The Left had no problem with a Democrat president operating like an all-powerful king when it served the Left’s extremist policy goals. But the Left cried foul when the Supreme Court last July laid out a nuanced framework for shielding a president from politically motivated criminal convictions after he leaves office for his official, constitutionally authorized acts while president.

The ruling in the case of Trump v. United States did not grant Mr. Trump full immunity for whatever he did while serving as the forty-fifth president of the United States. It called instead for a fact-intensive analysis to determine whether, and in what circumstances, Donald Trump, or any former president, is entitled to presidential immunity for his official acts performed as the head of the executive branch.

Nevertheless, like many of her kindred spirits, AOC protested that the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling “represents an assault on American democracy.” She added that “It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture.”

Recall that AOC and her fellow left-wingers seethed after the Supreme Court ruled to protect Congress from encroachment on its constitutional authority after President Biden took it upon himself to legislate with his student loan cancellation executive order. While the Left once again has displayed its hypocrisy, the Supreme Court in both the student debt and presidential immunity cases remained consistent in protecting the legislative and executive branches’ exercise of their respective constitutionally authorized powers.

In sum, the Left wants to destroy the Supreme Court because it stands between their lust for power under mob rule and the Constitution. Americans who believe in the rule of law cannot let that happen.