Ignore the Histrionic Attacks on the Supreme Court

After last summer’s ruling on abortion, attacks on the Supreme Court were inevitable. The majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health––that there is no constitutional right to abortion––broke with a long-standing precedent that a majority of the public supported while taking away a right that tens of millions valued, factors that stoked a backlash as significant as any the Court had seen in decades.

What’s striking and harder to understand is the similarly furious backlash to the Supreme Court’s most recent term, which began in October 2022 and culminated in rulings announced this summer. That term encompasses 60 cases in total. The nonpartisan National Constitution Center flagged 13 of those cases as significant. Taken together, they show a Court that is broadly in step with public opinion and whose justices form shifting coalitions across ideological lines.

But left-of-center critics have advanced a wildly different interpretation of this term. They have treated center-right rulings as confirmation of the Supreme Court’s awfulness, if not its illegitimacy.

“This is not a normal court,” President Joe Biden said after the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities cannot implement affirmative-action policies in admissions that discriminate against candidates on the basis of race. “It’s done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any Court in recent history.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extremists on the Supreme Court are once again more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

Representative Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat, told The Guardian, “When you look at how out of touch this court is with women’s rights, with racial equality, with voting rights, with the environment, with the challenges young people face, with LGBTQ+ rights, then you know they’re just out of touch. Many of these people couldn’t win elections for dogcatcher.”

“The Supreme Court is out of control,” The New Republic’s editor, Michael Tomasky, asserted in a fundraising pitch for the magazine’s coverage of the Court.

A professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, Mark Tushnet, even went so far as to send Biden an open letter urging him to disobey Supreme Court rulings at his own discretion in order “to restrain MAGA justices.” This argument shows no more regard for the rule of law and avoiding a constitutional crisis than did Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman before the January 6 riots.

The Supreme Court is not beyond criticism. I disagree often with all of its members and many