Most independent observers, left and right, have rightly lambasted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) for literally threatening two Supreme Court justices if they do not rule in favor of abortion rights in a case now pending before the Court.
What no one seems to have noticed, though, is that Schumer’s threat is part and parcel of the Democratic Party’s dangerous and decades-long politicization of the judiciary, and its ongoing attempt to subvert the courts to serve blatantly political ends.
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates, for instance, supported a court-packing scheme to ensure that the Supreme Court rules in a “progressive” way which ensures politically correct or desirable results.
Pete Buttigieg, for example, proposed expanding the number of justices on the court from nine to 15 through a selection process ostensibly designed to depoliticize the Court, but which, in reality, is itself highly politicized.
Joe Biden, who will be the Democratic presidential nominee, says he’s opposed to a Court-packing scheme. Yet, he nonetheless pledges to subject his Court appointments to a political litmus test in which would-be justices must affirm their commitment to Roe-v.-Wade, abortion rights, and other left-wing, “progressive” political goals.
Politicization. This is, sadly, unsurprising. The attempt to politicize the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, has reached a fever pitch on the left, with well-funded left-wing groups making this a high priority.
The left’s attack on the independence and integrity of the judiciary is also dangerous. This “is something we recognize as a banana-republic tactic when we see it in other countries,” writes National Review’s Dan McLaughlin. “Court-packing,” he notes,
is a Rubicon we should dread to cross. It last appeared on the national agenda in 1937, the high-water mark of one-party federal government at home and ideological authoritarianism around the globe.
Even then, it was roundly rejected by the American body politic. In one swoop, it would irreparably destroy the American tradition of judicial independence of the political branches.
In short order, this would end the American experiment of the rule of law and a government of separated and limited powers.
But Democrats and the left care little for what they clearly consider to be Constitutional niceties. What matters to them are results.
And, if they cannot achieve their desired political ends through the legislative branch of government, as the Constitution prescribes, then they will seek redress in the judiciary and the courts.
This has been happening for decades, as Democrats and the left have short-circuited the democratic process to achieve political results in the courts that they never could have achieved—or would have achieved more slowly and incrementally—in Congress and the state legislatures.
However, the left’s grip on the judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, is threatened now with the appointments of a new generation of originalist justices and judges who have a more modest and limited view of the judiciary’s role in American political life.
Indeed, as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, famously put it in his 2005 Congressional confirmation hearing:
Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role.
Democrats and the left, though, don’t view the Court’s role as limited; they view it as supreme, at least if it is pursuing a left-wing political agenda. Consequently, they are positively apoplectic that they are losing their grip on the judiciary.
That’s why they went to war over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, deploying mob intimidation tactics that we more often see in a banana-republic, not a mature and modern democracy.
Justice Kavanaugh, of course, and his colleague Justice Gorsuch, are the Court’s newest members; they were appointed by President Trump; and they have yet to fully rule on a host of matters, including but not limited to, abortion.
Sen. Schumer is not a stupid man. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and he boasts of achieving a perfect score on his SATs. He knew exactly what he was doing: He was laying down a marker for these new justices, and letting them know that they had better rule in politically correct fashion—or else.
Schumer has since apologized, but the damage to the rule of law and the integrity of our political and legal institutions already has been done. Democrats and the left have put the justices, and the judiciary more generally, on notice:
If you do not hew to the “progressive” political agenda, “you will pay the price,” as Schumer put it. “You won’t know what hit you,” and you will reap “the whirlwind.” This is frightening talk, made all the more dangerous because of the mob intimidation tactics sanctioned and encouraged by Democrats and the left.
And what makes these remarks all the more frightening is the spate of mass shootings in recent years by deranged individuals with political axes to grind.
It was only three years ago, after all, that a nut with a manifest hatred for Republicans almost wiped out the entire House Republican leadership and some two dozen GOP congressmen.
Unsurprising. Unfortunately, we should not be surprised by Schumer’s dangerous attempt to cow and intimidate the Supreme Court’s newest justices.
Democrats and the left have long made it their life’s political work to capture the judiciary and to use the courts for blatantly political purposes. And, to a disconcerting extent, they have been successful.
But with Trump’s appointment of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Court, that project is now threatened, and Democrats and the left are lashing out. Indeed, Schumer’s condemnable outburst wasn’t their first such attack and, sadly, it won’t be their last.
Feature photo credit: News Thud.