By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
A couple of weeks ago, I expressed the fear that, if the Democratic Party were to
try to pack the Supreme Court, the media would run cover for the enterprise,
implicitly or explicitly:
If the Democrats give in to their
worst instincts the next time they enjoy uniform power, all manner of
supposedly respectable figures are likely to go along. Undoubtedly, the press
will be among them. In theory, our journalists exist to push back against this
sort of Jacobinism. In practice, they are sympathetic to the ends and therefore
indulgent of the means. If it comes to it, they will mislead, euphemize,
downplay, and create false equivalences, such that contextualized debate
becomes impossible. The Democrats’ press releases will be echoed in the
newspapers verbatim.
Yesterday, Politico‘s Josh Gerstein illustrated precisely why I am worried. Gerstein penned a
report about a speech by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which Jackson had
“urged Americans”
to defend the judicial system
against salvos that jeopardize its independence, warning that such threats have
the potential to do serious damage to American democracy.
Gerstein points to these specifics of what Jackson said:
“Equal justice under law is a key
tenet to freedom in our society, and in order to have that, you have to have an
independent judiciary — one that is not beholden to the political branches or
beholden to people,” Jackson said during an appearance before hundreds of
students at Southern Methodist University. “I just wish that people really
focused on that and, therefore, stood up in some ways for the judiciary, when
people — judges are being attacked and undermined, that is really an attack on
our society.”
This is all well and good. Everything that Justice
Jackson said is correct, and I am pleased that she said it. But Gerstein simply
cannot — or will not — contextualize these comments for his readers.
Jackson, he notes,
did not mention any specific
attacks on the judiciary.
No. Well, she wouldn’t, would she? It’s appropriate for
her to remain vague. But Gerstein is under no such obligation. He can
list those “specific attacks.” He can discuss the politics around this
area in as much detail as he likes. And yet, grasping around for potential
candidates, he lands here — and only here:
Since the Supreme Court struck
down a key aspect of President Donald Trump’s tariff policy earlier this year,
Trump has unleashed an unusually caustic series of attacks on the three members
of the court’s conservative majority who joined the liberal justices in the 6-3
ruling.
Trump has also called for the
impeachment of district court judges who have ruled against the administration
on other issues, like deporting alleged gang members to a notorious
anti-terrorism prison in El Salvador without due process. Those calls prompted
Chief Justice John Roberts to declare publicly that he believes that judges
should not face impeachment due to disagreement with their rulings.
All of this is true. Trump did do this, and it was
disgraceful. I have no problem with Gerstein or anyone else calling it out — as
I have, each time it’s happened. The problem is that this
is all Gerstein can come up with as an example of the judiciary “being
attacked and undermined.” That isn’t the start of the list, or a sampling of
the list. That is the list. Donald Trump is where his examples begin and
end. Which means that, on May 12, 2026, Gerstein searched for “specific attacks
on the judiciary” — for examples, in his words, of “salvos that jeopardize its
independence” — and, when his search was complete, he had found only those that
had come from Donald Trump.
That is incredible. It is astonishing. It defies belief.
The last week in American politics — including while Gerstein was writing this
piece and while Justice Jackson was talking yesterday — has been so thoroughly
dominated by Democrats threatening to pack the United States Supreme Court,
abolish the Virginia Supreme Court, and interfere with any other court that
gets in their way that there has barely been room for any other news. And
he can’t — or he won’t — see it.
In the last seven days alone, the Democratic minority
leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, has said on TV that he covets “massive judicial reform” and
that “everything should be on the table,” both “state by state and at the
federal level”; Representative Ro Khanna has said that the Democrats “need to
expand this morally bankrupt [Supreme] Court from 9 to 13”; Senator Ruben
Gallego, a supposed moderate from Arizona, has
said that the Democrats must “add term limits and more justices”; Senator
Cory Booker, of New Jersey, has
said that the Supreme Court is “corrupt”; the governor of California, Gavin
Newsom, has said that “Americans are rightly questioning why it
deserves such power”; Representative Brendan Boyle, of Pennsylvania, has
said that “every Dem prez candidate better have a plan for bold and
aggressive judicial reform”; and Graham Platner, who is running for the Senate
in Maine, has said that “if we retake the Senate, get the majority, fingers
crossed, we need to use every single lever of power that we have to deal with
the Supreme Court,” by which he meant, he explained, “stacking the court” and impeaching some of
the current justices.
In Virginia, meanwhile, the rhetoric has been even
sharper. The lieutenant governor of the state, Ghazala Hashmi, has said
that the state’s Supreme Court is engaged in an “assault on our democratic
institutions,” while Virginia’s attorney general, Jay Jones, accused it of
having “put politics over the rule of law,” fueled “growing fears across our
nation about the state of our democracy,” and effected “a dangerous trend of
tilting power away from the people.” Worse still, as the New York Times reported, Democrats at the
federal level — including Jeffries, who will almost certainly be speaker of the
House of Representatives next year — got together with Democrats in Virginia to
discuss a bizarre plan to abolish the Virginia Supreme Court in retaliation
against its decision:
During a private discussion on
Saturday that included Democratic House members from Virginia and
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, the lawmakers
vented anger at their defeat at the Virginia Supreme Court, spoke about a collective
determination to flip two or three Republican-held seats under the existing map
and discussed a bank-shot proposal to redraw the congressional lines anyway,
according to three people who participated in the call and two others who were
briefed on it.
The most dramatic idea they
discussed — which would involve an unusual gambit to replace the entire state
Supreme Court, with a goal of reinstating their gerrymandered map — drew mixed
reactions on the call, said the people, and it was not clear that it would even
be viable, or palatable to Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Democrats in the
Virginia General Assembly.
Or, apparently, to Josh Gerstein, to whom it was
completely invisible, along with every single other thing that high-ranking
members of the Democratic Party have said in the last few days. Somehow,
Gerstein heard a member of the United States Supreme Court “defend the judicial
system against salvos that jeopardize its independence,” and the only thing
that he could think of was Trump. That’s telling, but it’s also pretty alarming
as a harbinger of things to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment