As the Supreme Court term nears its close, the left is redoubling its longstanding campaign to delegitimize the High Court, slander its conservative justices, and undermine the rule of law.
Just before the end of its term, the Court has not yet released its most high-profile decisions, namely Trump v. United States, in which the justices will rule on the question of presidential immunity, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the Court is reconsidering the future of the “Chevron Deference” doctrine that holds that courts must defer to federal bureaucrats to interpret statues. But the usual suspects on the left are already turning to vitriolic doomsday rhetoric about the Court in an apparent effort to pre-empt what they believe will be unfavorable rulings for the left.
The left’s anti-Court crusade, which has been ongoing since at least the smearing of Justice Clarence Thomas by Senate Democrats during his confirmation hearing in 1991, reached a new crescendo in 2020 when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) threatened two Trump-appointed justices by name in an unprecedented attack on judicial independence. “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price!” he warned.
In the years since, the left’s institutional war on the Supreme Court has only escalated. Just days ago, Congressman Daniel Goldman (D-NY) took to X to declare that, if Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito rule in ways that Goldman doesn’t like, they will “cement SCOTUS as a lawless, partisan wing of the GOP.” The very same day, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said live on CNN that the Court has “gone rogue.”
Earlier this year, former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer also stated that, if President Donald Trump wins a second term in office this November, the Supreme Court will be left with a “MAGA court majority.”
Additionally, last year, ProPublica, a non-profit with a history of promoting far-left radicalism, published a report accusing Thomas of “secretly accept[ing] luxury trips from a major Republican donor,” a real estate developer named Harlan Crow. By accepting these gifts, the group alleges, Thomas “appears to have violated” Supreme Court disclosure obligations by not reporting his airline travel as “gifts” from Crow. Yet despite leftists’ eagerness to pounce on charges of corruption against Thomas, as legal analyst Ed Whelan notes, ProPublica’s entire case rests upon “cherry-picked little-known and unnamed ‘experts’” presenting “a false and damning clarity on the matter.”
Regrettably, the left’s longstanding High Court hit job does not stop with Democrat officials. The corporate media apparatus, too, has gotten in on the action—signaling the end of a longstanding tradition of institutional respect for the Court in the media and beyond.
In recent weeks, for instance, the New York Times has launched a full-scale public relations war against Justice Samuel Alito on strikingly ludicrous grounds. In May, the Times ran an absurd piece alleging that Alito’s home had an upside-down American flag displayed outside, which the Times attempted to frame as proof that Alito is a secret insurrectionist who was intimately involved in the January 6 Capitol riot. The upside-down flag, the Times insisted, “could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality.”
Several weeks later, the Times targeted Alito for a second time—now attacking him for displaying the Revolutionary War era Pine Tree Flag outside his beach home in New Jersey. Though the flag has long been a bipartisan symbol of American patriotism and has flown outside statehouses in blue states, the Times outrageously wrote that the flag is nothing more than a “symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.”
When those attacks fell flat, the Times then ran with another ostensibly damning headline: at a private dinner in his personal capacity, Alito said “I agree with you” when a left-wing activist posing as a Catholic conservative said she believes America should “return to a place of godliness.”
The motivations for these smears should be abundantly clear to every American: in anticipation that decisions from this term could threaten their quest for power, Democrats are gearing up to oppose Court rulings that have not even been released yet.
The great irony, however, is that many of the major decisions that have been handed down by the Court thus far this term have favored Democrats’ political priorities. In Murthy v. Missouri, for instance, the Court sided with the Biden administration in a 6-3 decision that upheld the government’s ability to communicate with Big Tech platforms about removing content.
And in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, the Court temporarily greenlighted the administration of emergency abortions in Idaho.
These decisions, of course, clearly refute the left’s narrative that the High Court is a partisan body made up of Donald Trump loyalists bent on advancing conservative priorities. But to the left, anything less than the total allegiance of each and every justice is unacceptable.
The American people should take the left’s words at face value and recognize where their intentions truly lie: delegitimizing the court to turn it into yet another institution to advance their partisan political agenda.
For the good of the nation, every American should hope that their efforts fail.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
