by First Liberty Institute • 6 min read
The U.S. Supreme Court brought its current term to a close this week. With several decisions issued in multiple high-stakes cases, the radical Left responded the same way it has in years past: by attacking the Court’s conservative justices.
Every time a ruling doesn’t go its way, the far Left unleashes a wave of criticism, attacks and attempts to delegitimize the Supreme Court in the eyes of the American people.
A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed exposes the latest smear campaign against Justice Clarence Thomas.
Fix the Court—one of many radical organizations calling for a destruction of our judicial system—released a chart supposedly showing “extravagant” amounts of money Justice Thomas received in gifts and “likely gifts” between 2004 and 2023.
But as the Journal explains, “a review of Fix the Court’s claims shows multiple errors and deceptions.” The organization used a loose definition of what constitutes a “gift” and wildly inflated the dollar amounts to make Justice Thomas appear the villain.
And while the far Left likes to hyperfocus on the conservative justices, it often ignores or overlooks similar accusations against Democrat-appointed justices.
“The group doesn’t count Justice Breyer’s more than 230 trips for events—63 of them outside the U.S.—including the 17 trips the Pritzker family’s Architecture Foundation paid for Justice Breyer to take to London, Paris, Beijing and Copenhagen,” the Journal explains. “Justice Kennedy and his wife traveled to Europe many summers for a month to teach seminars, but none of those trips are on the Fix the Court chart.”
Of course, it’s not just the most extreme groups in the country who are trying to make Americans hallucinate misconduct. Many political leaders are also directing their ire against conservative justices faithful to the Constitution and whom they see as roadblocks to their political agenda.
On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called out his colleagues for trying to destroy conservative Supreme Court justices with all this talk about “ethics” reform. He specifically criticized the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act, a bill introduced by Senate Democrats that would radically expand the circumstances under which a Justice would be disqualified or recused from hearing a case.
“The worst thing that could happen is for the United States Senate and the House to determine what cases the Supreme Court hears,” Graham said. “It was a constitutional overreach. They’re trying to micromanage the Roberts court. They’re trying to destroy Alito and Thomas because they don’t like the fact of conservative judges.”
In a Senate floor speech, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky suggested Senate Democrats could be held accountable for their obsessive effort to get conservative justices to recuse themselves from certain cases.
“These Senators are telling the Chief Justice, privately, to change the course of pending litigation. This is known as ex parte communication, and it is frowned upon by the ABA’s Rules of Professional Conduct,” McConnell said. “This matters because at least two of these colleagues of ours…seem to be members of the Supreme Court Bar. If so, they are, therefore, potentially engaged in unethical professional conduct before the Court.”
House lawmakers are also pushing a bill to create an ethics “investigative office” inside the Supreme Court. The bill’s proponents say it will “provide transparency and accountability through exhaustive investigations into alleged ethical improprieties and reports to Congress on its findings.”
Don’t be fooled. This legislation is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt by one party in Congress to erode the separation of powers. That’s what Leader McConnell pointed out in an op-ed he published for The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
“As the court has maintained for decades, recusal is a judicial act. It isn’t, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said in response to my criticisms, ‘an administrative matter,’” McConnell wrote. “This misunderstanding suffuses efforts to force ethics ‘reform’ on the high court. Liberals complain that the court’s binding ethics rules lack an ‘enforcement mechanism’ to ensure recusal when they want it. But this complaint would throw the Constitution out the window.”
As many respected legal experts have explained, these so-called “ethics reform” bills are nothing more than a brazen power grab. It’s about one side disliking how the Supreme Court rules and seeking to rig the judiciary in their favor.
Make no mistake. Whether it’s court-packing or ending lifetime tenure for federal judges (court purging), or giving Congress “oversight” of the Court’s internal business, all of these constitutionally suspect proposals would be catastrophic.
This radical Supreme Court Coup would be the gateway to tyranny. It would end the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court. It would destroy our Constitution’s founding principle of separation of powers, erode all public confidence in future court rulings and eradicate our cherished rights and freedoms, including religious liberty.
Read More:
Wall Street Journal: The ‘Fix’ Is in With the Latest Attack on Clarence Thomas
The Hill: Graham: Senate colleagues trying to ‘destroy’ conservative Supreme Court justices with ethics reform
Washington Examiner: McConnell blasts Democrats’ attempts to undermine Supreme Court
Wall Street Journal: Mitch McConnell: Liberal Bureaucrats Threaten Democracy
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