Protecting an independent judiciary

The term of the U.S. Supreme Court that just ended weeks ago featured landmark decisions and will go down as historic in every way. But history will also record that justices have been confronted by protestors outside their own homes and that progressives seem determined to undermine the court’s authority. Further, though the justices unlocked freedoms long undermined by past judicial activism, a determined faction of leftists leave the future independence of the court in limbo.

Threats of violence and protests against justices at their homes led to protests of restaurants that dared offer an apolitical venue in which the justices could eat. Then, on cue, the calls from among the political left for court packing reached a fevered pitch.

The protests started following an unprecedented leak of the Dobbs majority opinion. Threatened with the prospect of seeing Roe v. Wade overturned, extremist and leftist activists swarmed the justices in a clear effort to intimidate. While those on the left loudly bemoaned the fall of democracy, their attempts to intimidate are a direct attack on democracy and demonstrated a complete lack of respect for the constitutional republic of this country.

For progressives—who seemingly have never faced a court that didn’t grant their every wish—losing has proven too much to bear.

And what did they lose? We know of Dobbs of course, a decision reversing the infamous Roe decision that led to the legalization of abortion nationwide, returning the issue to the states for their legislatures to decide. But others threaten the stranglehold leftist ideology has held on the freedom of millions of Americans.

For instance, in Carson v. Makin, the justices ruled that states cannot discriminate against parents who select schools that provide religious instruction from participating in student-aid programs. It’s a decision that continues the court’s trend toward ensuring that religious schools and organizations are not treated differently than their secular counterparts.

In another, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court upheld the free exercise rights of high school football coach Joe Kennedy to pray publicly at the 50-yard line after games. In that case, the court reversed a 50-year-old precedent, the so-called “Lemon test,” that had subjected public displays of religious belief to unconstitutional scrutiny. This, we are told, is a threat to democracy itself.

Thus, it is not surprising that a new poll by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports found that 53 percent of Democrats “strongly” or “somewhat” favor abolishing the current high court and replacing it with “a new, democratically elected Supreme Court with justices chosen by the American people directly.”

That would destroy our constitutional republic.

Our Constitution and court system are the envy of the world. Our right to due process, a jury trial, freedom of speech, and free exercise of religion are all threatened by radical leftists who simply didn’t get their way in a few cases.

Thankfully, a reasonable majority of Americans fed up with the aggressive woke left reject all of these dangerous attacks on the court and the rule of law.

The Wall Street Journal, citing a poll commissioned by First Liberty Institute and conducted by the Mason-Dixon polling firm, revealed that 65 percent of Americans continue to reject court packing. The poll came after the leaked Dobbs decision led to progressive outrage.

Perhaps what progressives fail to grasp is that the American people truly appreciate the checks and balances the third branch of our federal government provides our republic—something our Founders, in their wisdom, knew was essential to sustaining our freedom.

“We are a government of laws, not of men,” John Adams once observed. Our enviable court system protects those laws. As Alexander Hamilton said in Federalist No. 78, liberty “can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments,” which is why the “complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution.”

A politically organized court would destroy the independence of our judiciary. Americans want politicians to keep their political hands off the Supreme Court of the United States.