Those of us who go back a few years will recall the old refrain of elected officials who, when disappointed with this or that court outcome, cautioned that despite personal feelings we must all respect the duly arrived-at determinations of our courts.
The great wisdom in that approach is underscored by the reaction in leftist-Democrat “woke” circles to the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade. One does not have to be a judicial Einstein to recognize that, if left to fester, the current wave of protests against the Supreme Court will do more to undermine the rule of law and esteem for our rules and practices than any other recent phenomenon.
It is no answer that protest is ordinarily the legal right of all Americans. This is not about legal rights but about ineluctable effects. When protestors descended on Justice Brett Kavanaugh dining in a restaurant the other day, they targeted him for his legal reasoning and application of constitutional principles as he viewed them as if he were intellectually free to choose an alternative end result and he should have chosen the conclusion they favored.
Protesters are trying to intimidate him and other Justices in anticipation of future pivotal cases and to show what to expect if things don’t go their way. If these protesters are right, though, why should anyone accept someone else’s decisions that could have just as easily gone another other way? Faithful interpretation of facts should not be susceptible to intimidation, and intimidation should not be used to sway Justices from faithful interpretation.
The added wrinkle in the post-Roe v. Wade world is that it is the President of the United States that is leading the charge against the Supreme Court, the final arbiter of authoritative American decision-making.
While it is not unheard of for a president to strongly criticize and even urge a legislative response to a Supreme Court decision, this does not speak to the authoritativeness of the Court’s decisional result. Yet President Biden has savagely condemned the Dobbs decision. In fact, he has urged that the protests continue, as if that held the promise of swaying the Justices in the future. He said the Dobbs decision was “wrong-headed and not driven by the Constitution or history… What we’re witnessing wasn’t a constitutional judgment, it was an exercise in raw political power” and represented a choice “between the mainstream and the extreme.”
That’s the United States Supreme Court our President was raging about, folks. And to think we were worried not too long ago about the consequences of some statues being torn down.
