In praise of the Supremes

Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the Supreme Court, is the shortest of the three articles that define the institutions and powers of the three branches of the United States Government. That brevity underscores, somewhat ironically, what many would regard as a self-evident contemporary fact: the Supreme Court today is the only one of those three branches that is functioning properly.

Which is certainly something to ponder in the weeks before the nation marks its 250^th birthday on July 4.

Congress has become so dysfunctional that, a year ago, I gently asked a dozen Members of the House of Representatives whether Article I of the Constitution, which vests national legislative powers in the Congress, had been effectively repealed in the minds of many of their colleagues.

According to the Pew Research Center, Congress, whose primary power is the power of the purse, has only completed its budget work on schedule four times in the past fifty years; on all other occasions, the cheap trick of passing “continuing resolutions” has covered for the solons’ incapacity or unwillingness to do their jobs. As for the Senate, it routinely and supinely confirms manifestly incompetent men and women to high office, a practice that effectively eviscerates its constitutional role of giving advice and consent to candidates for crucial executive branch positions.

As for the presidency, well, as my friend Peggy Noonan put it in her Wall Street Journal column of April 4, we are now governed by the “mood of one man. With the great majority of past presidents personal mood didn’t have much precedence. … But mood now mows down all.” And fear of presidential mood swings reduces even serious public officials to “anxious ferrets sparring with Sunday news show anchors.”

The Supreme Court, on the other hand, regularly does its constitutional duty and is governed by reason and serious debate, not by partisan political calculations or the justices’ mood of the day.

It is my privilege to know several members of the current Supreme Court. And on the basis of four decades of Washington experience, I can say, without any fear of exaggeration, that these are among the finest public servants I have ever met. They do their jobs without fear or favor. They and their families suffer from the inconveniences (and worse) of having to endure constant security protection from a lunatic fringe: one that finds encouragement from the likes of Chuck Schumer, who infamously warned Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that “you won’t know what hit you” if future abortion cases got decided in a way that displeased the Senate minority leader.

Then there was that malodorous “Truth Social” post of last March, in which Mr. Trump declared that “Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization.” Why this splenetic presidential eruption? Because the justices remembered that their sworn allegiance was to the Constitution, not to Donald J. Trump, who petulantly labeled them “completely inept and embarrassing.”

The Democratic Party is now embracing numerous proposals for Supreme Court “reform”—adding four justices to the current nine; denying the Court the right to determine which cases it will decide; term-limiting the justices — that would thoroughly politicize the Court and effectively destroy it as an independent institution of the federal government.

Why is this happening? Various pseudo-rationales are offered. But the bottom of the bottom line, previewed in Senator Schumer’s rhetorical bullying of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, is that this Supreme Court had the audacity to reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 SCOTUS decision that invented a right to abortion out of thin air—a decision deplored by ultraliberal legal scholar and future Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox as lacking a “principled” legal foundation.

Some years ago, I was speaking with a bishop about his first experience of the bishops’ conference, which by ill luck happened to be the June 2002 Dallas meeting to address the sexual abuse crisis. An elderly bishop came up to the newbie, welcomed him to the conference, and then said, wistfully, “This used to be fun.” One can imagine a parallel situation in which the ghosts of such 19^th-century giants as John Marshall and Joseph Story lament to Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—the usual targets of Democratic, media, and lunatic opprobrium—“This used to be fun.”

Serious citizens, though, will give thanks on this semiquincentennial that our country can still produce constitutionally grounded jurists who regard their job as a patriotic duty and courageously honor their oath of office.

(Note: George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)