Nearly every media attack on “conservative” Supreme Court justices depicts completely innocuous behavior as corrupt and secretive. “How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak,” the New York Times’s recent entry in the genre, is no different.
“Last February,” the story begins, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sent his eight Supreme Court colleagues a confidential memo that radiated frustration and certainty.”
A confidential memo you say? Is the New York Times under the impression that chief justices of the Supreme Court are in the habit of posting internal legal memos on social media? If not, the word “confidential” is meant only to insinuate that another imaginary deception is afoot. The piece is larded with this kind of innuendo.
The central accusation, though, is that Roberts used “his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump.” Now, by “authority,” the New York Times means Roberts offered “arguments” on the constitutionality of lower court decisions — which, unless they’ve recently edited the founding documents, is his job.
The fact that any decision might benefit Trump tells us nothing useful about the quality of Roberts’s arguments. Yet other than a couple of vague quotes from experts, the New York Times doesn’t even bother exploring the legal dimensions of a single case. These days, it’s virtually impossible for anyone in politics to process an event without tethering it to the fortunes of Donald Trump. Thus, the notion that the former president’s underlying legal arguments might be worthwhile is unfathomable at the New York Times.
So let’s consider the “three momentous” decisions Roberts allegedly rigged for Trump.
One of them was a 9-0 decision in the former president’s favor that stopped Colorado from throwing the Republican Party’s presidential candidate off the state ballot for the crime of insurrection — not only a debatable contention but unproven in any court of law.
In the second case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upended decades of tradition, allowing the criminal prosecution of former presidents for acts related to their White House duties. I’m not sure I love the results of Trump v. U.S., which is hardly a license for a dictatorship, as many Democrats claim. But a decision staking out the limits of immunity is wholly within the high court’s purview. The Supreme Court would probably be abdicating its responsibility if it didn’t take it up.
The New York Times insinuates that Roberts sought these cases out specifically to help Trump. But Roberts rejected the “conservative” justices’ efforts to delay the decision until after the presidential election. And he then — brace yourself — beseeched colleagues to avoid looking merely at the “transient result” of this presidential election and consider the broad and “profound consequences for the separation of powers and for the future of our Republic.”
In the third decision, Fischer v. U.S., the court stopped federal prosecutors from abusing the Sarbanes-Oxley statute aimed at white-collar crime to prosecute Jan. 6 rioters. With a 6-3 split, with a concurring opinion by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, it’s highly unlikely that Trump viewed the decision as “momentous.”
Indeed, the very notion that the Solomonic institutionalist Roberts was just itching to let the Qanon Shaman off the hook is little more than paranoid left-wing nuttery.
What one really takes away from this latest hit piece is that the chief justice’s greatest transgression is disagreeing with Sonia Sotomayor — which typically puts one firmly on the side of the Constitution.
It’s worth remembering that Democrats are the ones who shaped Trump’s “winning streak” with their unprecedented lawfare. This Supreme Court losing streak, incidentally, began when former President Barack Obama was on the unconstitutional end of a string of Supreme Court decisions due to his propensity to abuse executive power. Rather than tempering the instinct, the contemporary Left decided it was simpler to try and cripple the judicial branch.
What began as Obama publicly condemning justices for upholding the First Amendment in Citizens United has evolved into a highly funded campaign that aims to erode public faith in justices and lay the groundwork for packing the court and transforming it into another partisan institution. An assault that Franklin D. Roosevelt-era Democrats argued “should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America” is now mainstreamed by the Left.
Democrats have little choice. The progressive project, or any authoritarian project, for that matter, can’t succeed if the high court takes the Constitution seriously. And efforts to destabilize the last properly functioning institution in American political life, one that occasionally upholds the law, should not be underestimated.
The New York Times was one of the leaders in spreading spurious accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. Both bylines on the New York Times piece, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, are anti-court activists. Kantor recently authored hit pieces linking the flag choices of Justice Samuel Alito’s family with Jan. 6 rioters.
You might recall Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) standing on the floor of the senate to say that “Justice Alito cannot credibly claim to be an umpire calling balls and strikes. He’s donned the jersey of his favorite team.” In case anyone is confused, the jersey he’s talking about belongs to the Jan. 6 rioters.
Liptak, too, has spread innuendo and smears for years, recently implying that Justice Clarence Thomas was lazy — though, counting dissents and concurrences, he’s written far more than any other justice. Thomas’s greatest crime is rejecting the Left’s political stereotypes. For this sin, he will be smeared with racial ones his entire career.
Then again, the average New York Times reader likely imagines the paper’s reporters vigorously scribbling quotes into their notebooks while clandestinely meeting sources in underground garages. In truth, the modern reporter rarely leaves his or her desk — unless heading over to MSNBC or CNN for a hit. All he or she needs to do is wait.
Generously funded activist groups and Senate staffers do all the work these days. Once they’ve cobbled together a smear, no matter how wobbly, they go out and sell it to the media. They start with once-respected publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post before trying their luck at Politico or Axios, working their way all the way down to Slate or ProPublica, which will run anything.
Whoever finally takes the bait then launders and polishes the libel, couching the accusations in journalistic verbiage to create a patina of credibility. After the piece is published, the same people who handed the story to reporters use the finished product to raise more money to attack the court further. Even the journalists who wouldn’t bite on the original risible accusations now get to spread the story as second-hand reporting.
Nowhere is this corrupt process more transparent than in the Left’s campaign to destroy the Supreme Court.
(Let’s not forget the person, or people, leaking internal court documents to the New York Times. They, too, are part of a conspiracy to destroy the Supreme Court. The Dobbs leak was unprecedented — and, still, somehow unsolved. If this becomes the norm, it’s going to be difficult for justices to engage in honest, open debates.)
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The New York Times informs us that trust in the Supreme Court is near an all-time low. It always does. And, of course, it is. A billion-dollar decadelong investment to eliminate constitutional order has ensured a drop in public trust. But, I guess, there’s hope. What these reporters never mention is that trust in the court is still at a far higher level than it is in Congress or the White House or either presidential candidate — or journalism. Definitely a lot higher than trust in journalism.
With these kinds of shoddy pieces, it’s no wonder.