It’s become evidently clear that U.S. leftists are engaged in a tactical crusade to destroy the credibility of the Supreme Court — and it’s not difficult to see why.
Throughout the past several months, the Trump administration has asked the nation’s highest court to block overreaching injunctions by rogue lower-court judges. These (predominantly Democrat-appointed) judges have eagerly greenlit the lawfare waged by Democrat-affiliated groups and activists seeking to grind the president’s agenda to a halt via a judicial coup.
Rather than acquiesce to this courtroom activism, a majority of justices have frequently issued momentary pauses (or “stays”) on these injunctions while the merits of the cases continue to percolate through the judiciary, effectively pausing leftist lawfare designed to reject voters’ control over American government.
Unsurprisingly, political and media leftists are using SCOTUS’s temporary resolutions to the problems their allies created to try and destroy the court’s reputation by falsely painting it as a rubber stamp for Trump. The latest example of this smear campaign came on Monday, when left-wing rag Rolling Stone published an unhinged column by Andrew Perez and Ryan Bort. Titled, “The Supreme Court Is Trump’s Partner in Crimes Against America,” the two prima donna authors hyperbolically claimed the high court is “actively enabling the restored president’s fascist regime.”
The conservative-leaning justices “are now not merely acting as [Trump’s] lapdogs, but his accomplices in a wave of crimes against the American people and all else who reside here,” Perez and Bort whined in melodramatic fashion.
The Rolling Stone hit piece and spate of leftist-led attacks against the Supreme Court in recent weeks is not a new phenomenon, either. Over the past several years, Democrats and their media allies have been busily running pathetic hatchet jobs and smears against the court’s Republican appointees to undermine Americans’ faith in the high court and its decisions. (These actions don’t even include threats from high-profile Democrats like former President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, radical left-wing demonstrations outside of the justices’ homes, and a failed assassination attempt on Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.)
While the egregiousness of this vilification campaign cannot be overstated, it’s pivotal to understand why leftists have decided to wage war against the Supreme Court. For a significant part of the 20th century, the nation’s highest court acted as a de facto lawmaking body for Democrats. Instead of applying the Constitution and existing statutes as written, many activist justices twisted the meaning of legal provisions to effectively invent new laws out of thin air.
One of the most prominent examples of this was the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, in which a majority of justices unilaterally added a “right to privacy” to the 14th Amendment’s due process clause to grant women a fake constitutional “right” to terminate their unborn child. As the Supreme Court correctly noted in its 2022 Dobbs decision overturning that precedent, however, “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
For leftists, it didn’t matter that the court’s Roe decision effectively stripped the ability of the American people to decide abortion policies through their elected representatives, or that the court had clearly overstepped its constitutional limits. What mattered was that they were able to shoehorn their radical agenda into law without having to go through the normal (and extensive) legislative process.
Unlike many of their predecessors, a majority of current justices have (for the most part) demonstrated a willingness to adhere to the original intent of the Constitution and federal statutes in notable cases that come before the court. Their willingness to revoke overreaching decisions by past activist justices has resulted in the court removing itself from policy issues meant to be decided by the American people.
And it is those reasons undergirding leftists’ unrelenting attacks against SCOTUS. Under its current makeup, the high court is no longer available as an avenue to advance Democrats’ radical ideology into every corner of society without first receiving approval from the American public. It’s one of the few remaining institutions leftists don’t control, and they can’t stand it.
But as with any entity, what the left can’t dominate, they must destroy. If their intimidation campaigns won’t work against a majority of the Republican appointees (like they so often have against Chief Justice John Roberts), then they will do everything in their power to undermine the Supreme Court and the work these justices are doing to preserve the Constitution.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
