Supreme Court upheld the Constitution in spite of Democrats’ ginned-up overreaction | Opinion

The U.S. Supreme Court ended its 2022-23 session by releasing long-awaited rulings on several important cases — and could be forgiven if the justices immediately fled to undisclosed locations.

They could hardly be blamed for seeking a safe harbor, given the left’s choreographed overreactions to rulings in which the court’s conservative majority put fealty to the U.S. Constitution ahead of public sentiment ginned up by Democrats and their allies in public opinion polling and the mainstream media.

This year’s reactions were essentially a summer re-run of last year’s hysterical overreactions to the leaked ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and returning to the states the authority to regulate abortions.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (a.k.a. AOC), who wants to add four justices to the court, told CNN “The Supreme Court is far overreaching their authority, and I believe, frankly, that we really need to be having conversations about judicial review as a check on the courts as well.”

Perhaps AOC is unfamiliar with Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review, affirming the authority of federal courts to declare legislation and executive actions unconstitutional. That decision, authored by John Marshall, was rendered in 1803. Talk about long-standing precedents.

Sadly, President Biden, aware of criticism from the left, opined that “This is not a normal court,” but — also aware that he currently lacks enough votes in Congress — stopped short of advocating an expansion to 13 members from the current nine.

What Biden did promise, however, was to seek ways to use whatever executive authority he could find to evade and/or undermine the court’s rulings, especially those that might cause consternation among younger voters in his party’s base.

Biden, of course, was not focused on the three recent rulings that went his way but instead on those with which he disagreed. One held that the race-based admissions criteria used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional. The other blocked his effort to bypass Congress’s appropriations role and unilaterally forgive hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt.

Biden also took a swipe at a decision holding that, notwithstanding a Colorado law barring discrimination, a web designer had a First Amendment right to refuse to build a website for a gay couple because that conflicted with the designer’s beliefs.

This ruling was denounced as a setback for LGBTQ+ rights, but its critics should flip the script and ask themselves how they’d feel if an LGBTQ+ web designer were asked to create a website for the hateful, anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a cult.

Biden’s reaction to these decisions brings to mind some shameful chapters in American history when politicians attacked court decisions and sought to evade them.

Historians may remember the 1960s as a tumultuous decade marked by rioting and assassinations but that era was also notable for its push to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Warren, a Republican who had been California’s governor, served as chief justice from 1953 until 1969. He presided over the court during the 1954 school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education.

That ruling, which commendably overturned the 58-year-old precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson, triggered massive resistance not only in the South, where demagogic elected officials openly defied it year after year, but also in major northern cities.

Because of the politicians’ defiance, it took decades for school desegregation to proceed, and it’s still a work in progress. Meanwhile, the current Supreme Court’s ruling against unconstitutional racial quotas in higher education should not be unfairly portrayed as racist or even as a setback for desegregation.

Indeed, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.

“But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

It’s too bad that Biden and other shrill critics of the current Supreme Court’s conservative majority rail against the court’s rulings instead of trying to educate the public about the court’s proper role and its efforts to uphold the U.S. Constitution that the court’s critics also swore to uphold but too often ignore.