The Left’s attack on courts is meant to destroy the Constitution

Do we? Great, let’s do it today. Republicans run both houses and the White House, after all. They could pack the court right now. According to Khanna, there’s nothing procedurally or constitutionally improper about it. Indeed, it’s imperative. Surely, the congressman isn’t proposing that one party should be empowered to operate under a different set of rules than the other? 

Of course, we all know that if Trump packed the court, progressives would shriek “fascism” until they had a mass stroke. The contemporary leftist is a consequentialist with no limiting principles. 

After the Virginia Supreme Court stopped the Democrats’ unconstitutional gerrymandering scheme, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), now the favorite 2028 Democratic Party presidential prospect in a number of polls, claimed that the court “didn’t overturn a map” but “overturned an election,” and that “the power of the American people that should be the ultimate check on all three branches.”

In any other age, vocalizing illiterate nonsense about our system of governance might be an embarrassing career-ending flub. Today, it’s the norm among progressives. At this point, I’m not even sure most of her audience understands why this crass majoritarian argument is un-American.

Then again, none of the left’s political objections to the court are grounded in anything resembling a legal argument. Progressives grouse about “lawless judges” because they make no distinction between failing to get their way and criminality. Democrats never even bother to mention the Constitution in their critiques of the Supreme Court. Which is weird, considering that the court’s most vital responsibility is to uphold it. After the court upheld the Voting Rights Act, ensuring that Louisiana could not create race-based districts as the law demands, Khanna claimed that “moral light” of the court had been “extinguished,” which is just gibberish.  

The Left’s case for “reform” centers around the specious idea that the court is failing because it doesn’t adhere to their political vision or the vision of the fleeting majority. 

History has shown that one of the first propositions of authoritarians is to destroy any judicial system that upholds the law. Which is why Democrats want to overturn state constitutions as well.

“We’re going to have to explore judicial reform state by state and at the federal level,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) recently said, proposing a nationwide takeover of the courts, ”…everything should be on the table as far as I’m concerned.”

They mean everything. One of the ideas being thrown around by Democrats is to have the Virginia General Assembly lower the mandatory retirement age for Virginia’s Supreme Court from 75 to 54, the age of the youngest current justice, then replace the entire court with leftists who will rubber-stamp the most radical gerrymandering scheme in the history of the republic. 

For years, left-wing media and Democrats have tried to delegitimize the Supreme Court by contending that it was under the thumb of Trump, even after it largely shut down the president’s most prized domestic policy in tariffs and his attempts to federalize the Illinois National Guard. The notion that Justices Sonia Sotomayor or Ketanji Brown Jackson are less partisan than Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett is preposterous.

For years, progressive activist groups propped up by wealthy activists have been cooking up imaginary scandals about justices and laundering them through faux journalistic operations. There has never been a scintilla of evidence offered by any leftist that any of the “conservative” justices have altered their judicial philosophy or approach for any personal benefit.

There is no “lawlessness.” There is an ideological disagreement. 

As for term limits, Khanna and others are offering credulous lefties more unattainable promises. Term limits would immediately be struck down as unconstitutional. Article III bestows lifetime appointments on justices to shield the high court from the vagaries and fleeting pressures of political debate and demagogues like Khanna.

Not every institution in American life needs to reflect fleeting mainstream opinions (though progressives overestimate their popularity, anyway.) Moreover, the court’s disposition should be conservative. Something needs to buttress against the recklessness of majoritarianism. The Founders were clear on this.

This isn’t the first time authoritarians have threatened the country with court packing. When FDR famously floated his own power-grab court-packing scheme in 1937, the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee blasted it as “a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America” because “it undermines the protection our constitutional system gives to minorities and is subversive of the rights of individuals.”

This is the goal of Khanna and others on the illiberal left. Like President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s transparent attempt to circumvent the constitutional order, the modern case for court-packing is predicated on little more than grabbing power.

The problem is that this time, it is unlikely any Democrats care enough about the Constitution to stop it.