Those Smearing SCOTUS Are The Biggest Threat To American ‘Democracy’

Destroying trust in the court opens the floodgates for government abuse and destabilizes the nation in unprecedented ways.

he other day, Chris Murphy was on MSNBC with illiberal popinjay Mehdi Hasan, triumphantly discussing the left’s coordinated smear campaign to destroy the legitimacy of the judicial branch of the United States government.

Then, this insane claim came out of his mouth:

Listen, the reason Ted Cruz and Republicans are, you know, so out of their minds about protecting this Supreme Court is because the Supreme Court is the new right-wing legislature for this country. Republicans’ agenda is so unpopular in Congress — banning abortion, getting rid of background checks, requirement eviscerating voting rights laws — that they can’t pass it through the majoritarian institutions, so instead Republicans and the right wing have outsourced legislating to the Supreme Court. And so when there is a potential that they are going to lose their grip on the Court, they get their backs against the wall.

What in the hell is this person talking about? Are MSNBC viewers under the impression the Supreme Court banned abortion? It was Roe v. Wade that concocted a “right” unmentioned anywhere in the Constitution and then, by fiat, decreed it the law of the land without a debate or vote. Dobbs handed the issue back to voters. Or, more precisely, it did what Murphy contends the high court should be doing. Roe created law by decree. Obergefell created a law by decree. The left has spent decades relying on the court to bypass the electorate.

That Murphy is unable to come up with a single example of the Supreme Court legislating from the bench is telling. SCOTUS never got “rid of background checks” — nearly every gun sold in the country goes through one. Nor has the court ever made a “requirement eviscerating voting rights laws,” whatever that means.

Notice that Murphy frames “protecting” the Supreme Court as corrupt behavior. The Connecticut senator says that conservatives have a “grip” on the Supreme Court as if a duly elected president hadn’t nominated all these justices and a duly elected Senate hadn’t confirmed them using the prescribed constitutional method that’s been in place since the founding.

Murphy’s problem isn’t that the court is negligent but that it occasionally upholds constitutional limits on state and majoritarian power — which is the job of the judiciary. In Federalist 78, Hamilton writes that limiting state power can only be “preserved in practice” through “the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.”

More From The Federalist: