by Jarrett Stepman
The Left has let the mask slip and made clear that it intends to pack or otherwise decimate the Supreme Court.
President Joe Biden announced last week in a Washington Post op-ed that he would promote a “reform” of the nation’s highest court that would include term limits and new “ethics” rules for justices.
The plan was signed off on by Vice President Kamala Harris, who at this point appears to be the de facto president with Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race.
The Left’s plan to bork the court isn’t just being backed by the White House; it’s being adopted by prominent Democrats and members of the left-wing literati.
“The Supreme Court has become a morass, both ethically and substantively,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told NBC News after Biden’s announcement. “We’re going to look at everything. There are lots of proposals.”
A leftist law professor at Northwestern University wrote for The Hill that Biden didn’t go far enough and that the White House should just start packing the Supreme Court without bothering to soft-pedal it with term limits.
These threats should be taken seriously.
Justice Neil Gorsuch weighed in over the weekend on Fox News, saying that the Biden administration—presumably including Harris—should “be careful” about threatening the independent judiciary.
Gorsuch noted that it’s important for Americans to be confident that even “when you’re unpopular you can get a fair hearing under the law and under the Constitution.”
Gorsuch then asked, rhetorically: “Don’t you want a ferociously independent judge and a jury of your peers to make those decisions? Isn’t that your right as an American?”
I don’t think the Left actually cares about that.
Many leftists are seemingly happy with a two-tiered system of justice as long as they control it and decide which people deserve what the Left sees as government-granted rights.
The God-given rights explicitly cited in our Declaration of Independence are just a crazy, right-wing, Christian nationalist fantasy, they say.
Once leftists think they’ve taken unassailable political power, they think any limitation of their power is unacceptable.
Leftists rely on powerful, unelected institutions—whether higher education, nongovernmental organizations, Big Tech companies, federal and state bureaucracies, and often the courts—to effectively carry out their agenda perpetually, regardless of elections or their popularity.
They’ve made long-term bets that those who control institutions control the future. And it’s hard to deny that the Left no longer marches through the institutions; the institutions are marching on the Left’s behalf.
It’s this institutional ecosystem they’re referring to as they perpetually lament that “our democracy” is under threat by former President Donald Trump or Project 2025 or whatever their boogeyman of the moment is.
Which leads us to Democrats’ plan to “reform” the Supreme Court.
Right now, the high court operates as one of the few checks on the Left’s power.
Instead of just court-packing right away during the Biden presidency, a tactic unlikely to work with Republican opponents in the Senate, leftists used the past few years to do everything in their power to smear the court as illegitimate.
The Left likes to promote the idea that public confidence in the Supreme Court has dropped to a “historic low.” That may be technically true, but the court only hit that historic low because of its collapse among Democrats.
Also, how are other institutions doing these days? Mostly a whole lot worse.
Much of the Supreme Court’s collapse in trust happened—no surprise—during Biden’s presidency. The court didn’t simply rubber-stamp the administration’s policies and power grabs, and when it overturned the bad precedent of Roe v. Wade, it sent the Left into a tizzy.
The Left’s elite media allies went into action, cooking up bogus scandals to create the illusion that Republican presidents’ appointees to the Supreme Court are crooked or wild-eyed maniacs.
Remember the dopey flag stories targeting Justice Samuel Alito?
All those reports were meant to ensure that the Left’s base would turn fully against the high court, and that largely worked.
Alito, Clarence Thomas, and other conservative members of the Supreme Court on the Left’s hit list haven’t backed down, haven’t resigned, and haven’t recused themselves from specific cases. This gave the Left a green light to say, “See, we tried to appeal to reason, now we have no choice but to take action.”
It’s hard to see the Left and the Democrat Party refraining from taking the next step.
The radicals aren’t just going to patiently wait for Supreme Court justices’ retirements this time. They’ve lined up their metaphorical cannons and await the right political moment to declare a mandate and launch the hostile takeover, consequences be damned.
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Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett
Photo “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz” by Kamala Harris.
