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It’s gotta be a red-letter day when we have something positive to say about a political weathervane like Chief Justice Roberts… and so it is.
There is nothing about these last few years that can be considered ‘ordinary’… especially in DC. Ever since McConnell denied Merrick Garland his ‘rightful place’ among The Nine in the federal political pantheon of Democrat Power-brokers, the left has resented the Supreme Court. No longer was it seen as the beloved institution giving Dems an opportunity to rubber-stamp every pet priority too odious to pass through the process of traditional legislation.
With Trump’s election, we saw — for the first time since the 1930s — Dems lose effective control of the highest court in the land. Gorsuch kept Scalia’s seat from flipping blue. That was bad, but it came out as a wash. The attempts to slander Kavanaugh and intimidate him into withdrawing his nomination were disgraceful. Then, when RBG’s seat flipped to red, driving a stake in the heart of any liberal activist dreams of using the court to accomplish what legislation could not, the left near lost their minds.
Suddenly, talk of ‘reforming’ the court was top-of-mind. Calls for court-packing — unthinkable for generations — were suddenly fair game. Trump’s appointees were treated as ‘tainted’ even though they went through exactly the same process every other Article III judge passed through.
The Vice President — on the same day that her boss was using the occasion of solemn 9/11 commemorations to draw ominous comparisons between Trump voters and Al Qaeda — denounced a co-equal third branch of government as ‘activist’. (This is the same Veep who helped raise bail for rioters looting and burning their way through cities while attacking police in 2020.)
Many elected Democrats have gone even so far as to denounce it as illegitimate.
That is the context in which Chief Justice Roberts entered the conversation.
It’s been a crazy year. Someone broke centuries of near-sacred tradition by leaking a draft copy of a SCOTUS ruling before it had been completed.
That set off a firestorm of events that ranged from violence against Churches and pro-life groups, to an assassination plot against members of SCOTUS.
The President, his spokesmuppet, and Wingman Merrick Garland all stood idly by, refusing to enforce the law that made protesting the homes of the third branch of government a felony.
This dereliction of duty was cheered by Dems in the House and Senate, who were some of the loudest voices blasting the top court, and that criticism has only gotten louder with the Dobbs decision.
To hear the rhetoric, you’d think they had outlawed abortion completely, rather than giving America back the same Federalism that Ruth Bader Ginsberg herself thought was the better course of action.
This 3-minute-clip came from Roberts’ first public appearance since the Dobbs decision.
After touching on questions about the alien nature of empty courts and zoom calls during the COVID years, Roberts turned to (Democrat) allegations of SCOTUS illegitimacy.
Unlike the partisans who spent their time torching a coequal branch of government, he gave a measured response, starting at about the one-minute mark, explaining why the people blasting him have a constitutional RIGHT to do so, but their reasons for doing so are half-baked at best.
Picking up at 1:47, after acknowledging the court’s role and duty to decide controversial cases — ‘lately the criticism is phrased in terms […] call[ing] into question the legitimacy of the court […] the legitimacy of the court rests on the fact that it satisfies the requirements of the statute and that the Constitution needs, as John Marshall put it, somebody to say what the law is. Adn that’s the role of the Supreme Court and that role doesn’t change simply because people disagree with this opinion or that opinion or disagree with the particular mode of jurisprudence.
So obviously, people can say what they want […] and if they want to say that its legitimacy is in question they are free to do so, but I don’t understand the connection between opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the court. If the court doesn’t retain its legitimate function of interpreting the Constitution, I’m not sure who would take up that mantle. You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is, and you don’t want public opinion to be the guide of what the appropriate decision is so […] simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the court […]
The left, predictably, was outraged even by this. The usual suspects blasted him.
But none of that changed the central point he made about the emptiness of their criticism.
Who would take up that mantle?
Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.
Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.
This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.
