Senate Democrats were so proud of the results from their 20-monthlong “investigation” into what they wanted everyone to believe was an “ethical crisis” at the Supreme Court that they buried their report on its findings by making it public on the Friday afternoon before Christmas. Thus, it made as little news as they could have hoped, for it’s an utterly thin document that is so flimsy it’s embarrassing for all connected to it.
The reality is that Senate Democrats have not investigated an ethical crisis at the Supreme Court so much as they have been trying to manufacture a scandal that does not bear scrutiny. As the results of the election this past November showed, Senate Democrats failed miserably.
For over 90 pages, the Judiciary Committee report details plane trips taken, books sold, and flags flown by justices from the Left and Right, but not once does the report come close to identifying an instance of a party with business before the Supreme Court influencing a justice’s decision.
“Now more than ever before, as a result of information gathered by subpoenas, we know the extent to which the Supreme Court is mired in an ethical crisis of its own making,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) said in a statement. “It’s clear that the justices are losing the trust of the American people at the hands of a gaggle of fawning billionaires.” He’s right that “we know the extent” to which the court is mired, and the extent is not at all.
Overall approval of the Supreme Court has fallen from a high of 58% as recently as July 2020 to just 43% today, but that fall is entirely due to the propaganda campaign against the justices and is confined exclusively to Democratic partisans. Among Democrats, 56% approved of the Court in 2020, and only 15% approve of it today. Independent voter approval of the court, at 44%, is up from a low of 36% two years ago.
What discredited the Supreme Court in the eyes of Democrats was not the phony ethics complaints from Senate Democrats but the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned the invented constitutional right to abortion contained in Roe v. Wade. Before that decision, 56% of Democrats approved of the Supreme Court, which fell to 13% after Dobbs.
It is precisely because of the likelihood that single cases could produce wild swings in public opinion that the authors of the Constitution isolated the judicial branch from political pressure by giving justices lifetime tenure. Durbin and his Democratic allies in the Senate are desperately seeking to undermine and remove this protection while claiming the incoming administration is threatening constitutional government. Durbin has always been a peculiarly unimpressive member of the Senate — it is why his colleagues passed him over for leadership and chose Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) instead — and his hapless and tendentious campaign against the originalist justices demonstrates the point.
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If anything, it is not right-wing dark money but the Democratic Party’s attack on the Supreme Court that is driven by “a gaggle of fawning billionaires,” including the Sandler Foundation and Arabella Advisors, which have funneled millions of dollars to left-wing groups bent on undermining the legitimacy of the judicial branch. These groups hoped that if Vice President Kamala Harris won and Democrats maintained control of the Senate, they could have packed the court with new justices, negating the current justices’ jurisdiction in controversial cases. Democrats don’t want justice or constitutional government. They want an engine of progressive change.
Fortunately, most voters saw through the Democrats’ nakedly dishonest attempt to turn the judicial branch into an arm of the Left and rejected Harris and Senate Democratic candidates at the ballot box. The lame Friday-before-Christmas release of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s pitiful work product is a fitting last gasp of this pathetic effort.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
