Democrats are so desperate to keep the Supreme Court from torpedoing their lawfare efforts against former President Donald Trump that members like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., are openly vowing to launch a coordinated attack on the judicial branch if they don’t get their way.
Last week, The New York Times published a smear piece on Justice Samuel Alito “to indict the conservative judge as a partisan ideologue corrupted by far-right politics” all because an “Appeal to Heaven” flag flew outside his New Jersey beach home last year, my colleague Tristan Justice explained. The story came days after another hit piece alleged Alito was compromised because of an upside-down American flag flown by his wife.
Raskin pounced on the stories, however, arguing on MSNBC that if Alito doesn’t “heed the calls to recuse himself from the [Jan. 6-related] case,” there should be a federal ethics panel made up of circuit judges to which Raskin and other Democrats can whine and undermine the Supreme Court any time they don’t get their way. This is in addition to House Democrats’ newly announced task force, of which Raskin is a member, that exists to overhaul the court through legislation and rhetoric.
Raskin took his attacks one step further, last week encouraging Americans to “fall out of love” with the Supreme Court and arguing the institution can only be trusted once Democrats have control of its operations.
[T]o my mind, we’ve gotta organize the people in America. That’s where the power comes from. And we will, if and when we win back the House and the Senate and the White House. We will look at the Supreme Court and figure out what can be done about that extremely corrupted and contaminated body.
Fellow Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse reiterated Raskin’s message in a post on X saying, “Yes we will, brother. Yes we will.”
But the Supreme Court isn’t “corrupted” or “contaminated.” It’s simply not acting as footsoldiers of the executive branch or an arm of the Democrat Party. And that’s the real reason Raskin and other Democrats are hell-bent on playing up the Alito nonstory.
The Supreme Court is set to rule on whether obstruction charges can be levied against Jan. 6 protesters — and could possibly derail one of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s cases against Trump involving presidential immunity. By falsely connecting the “Appeal to Heaven” flag to so-called “right-wing extremism” rather than its actual history of the Revolutionary War, Democrats can smear the court — as Raskin put it — as a “corrupted” and “contaminated” branch of government that can no longer function independently but must be supervised by Democrat lawmakers.
In fact, the Democrats’ rosily named “court reform” task force is working to expand the bench, create term limits for justices, force the Supreme Court to create a code of ethics based on partisan public input, and create an independent review board to hear ethics complaints lobbed against the justices.
But as Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist 78, the judicial branch “is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced” if tied to either the executive or legislative branch.
“Though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter; I mean so long as the Judiciary remains truly distinct from both the Legislature and the Executive,” Hamilton wrote. “And it proves, in the last place, that as liberty can have nothing to fear from the Judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Comments are closed.