OPINION:
“He was the only legend remaining on the court, and the fact that he was still breathing irritated most of the mob below. Soon after, he became the first of two left-leaning United States Supreme Court justices to die by assassination. The murdered justices were ’Too Liberal to Live,’” according to a headline in The New York Times.
Thankfully, the justices were fictional. Though quite real, the Times headline was from a review of John Grisham’s novel “The Pelican Brief.” Mr. Grisham’s “gripping legal suspenser” begins with bipartisan assassinations of two justices, a liberal Democrat and a swing-voting Republican.
The novel leads the reader to suppose at first that the court’s ideological makeup has motivated a deranged right-wing extremist to change the court’s composition during a Republican president’s term. The novel’s plot twist emerges with the revelation that an evil, greedy corporation masterminded the assassinations to produce more lenient environmental rulings from business-friendly justices whom the Republican president would appoint.
In real life, left-wing lunatics have plotted assassinations of Republican-appointed justices during a Democratic president’s term to keep the court from altering its abortion jurisprudence. Reality stands in opposition to the mainstream media tropes in Mr. Grisham’s made-for-Hollywood legal thriller starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington in the namesake film adaptation.
Also in real life, leftist ideologues want you to believe that the Supreme Court’s institutional survival requires Congress to tinker with the judicial branch by expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, limiting the justices’ tenure and imposing a congressionally mandated ethics code. Congress, after all, knows a lot about ethics.
The answer is not to impose ill-conceived and constitutionally suspect ethics rules on the Supreme Court or tinker with its membership size or limit justices’ terms. The answer is to hold accountable those who would visit violence on the justices and political attacks, in the guise of reform, on the Supreme Court.
The perpetrators seek retribution for outcomes in cases that their side lost. Nothing has inflamed leftist passions more than the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the abortion issue to the states — where the Constitution, by its silence on the subject, left the issue in the first place.
The threats against the justices should alarm everyone. One man earned a year in jail for threatening to kill the chief justice.
Another awaits trial on charges he attempted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Yet another faces federal charges in connection with threats to torture and kill all six of the Republican-appointed justices.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has survived two assassination attempts in two months. Amid the prevailing leftist rhetoric about “threats to democracy,” it’s worth pausing to consider which side in our divided political discourse is threatening the institutions of our constitutional republic. That would be deranged leftists.
But that is not all. Nonphysical threats to the court include leaking the Dobbs decision before it was released, calls by Democratic lawmakers to change the basic and important features of the court, leaking private conversations of the justices and highly personal attacks against the wives of justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.
With the Democrats’ real-life plot borrowed from a John Grisham novel, disgruntled men have tried to create Supreme Court vacancies while Democrats occupy the White House so they can shift the court’s composition and get the results they want.
Alexander Hamilton called the judiciary “the least dangerous branch” of the federal government. Unlike the president, the Supreme Court commands no armies, and unlike Congress, the court lacks the power of the purse. The court and its justices can do little to protect themselves. They are not politicians who rally supporters to their side or threaten their detractors.
The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Justice has refused to prosecute mobs of protesters attempting to intimidate Republican-appointed justices outside their homes despite a federal law prohibiting protests outside a judge’s residence. Congress slow-rolled funding for personal protection of the justices while media apparatchiks reported on these developments with no discernible condemnation.
So far, law enforcement has neutralized these threats against the justices, but the political attacks on the institution of the Supreme Court continue unabated. As long as leftists continue with unrestrained, results-oriented assaults on the court as an institution, it is up to voters to expel from office the politicians who continue to target the Supreme Court.
That’s a better plot twist than anything John Grisham could devise.
• Gayle Trotter is a lawyer and political commentator in Washington. Her views are her own. Follow her on X @GayleTrotter or at gayletrotter.com.
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