Lauren C. Moye, FISM News
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Chief Justice John Roberts defended the Supreme Court of the United States this weekend against increased criticisms of “illegitimacy,” particularly by leading Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Kamala Harris.
SCOTUS has had a term full of controversial moments, including the full draft leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, riots outside of justice’s homes, security barriers set up outside the Court, and the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade that returned authority to the states.
Through it all, the justices have faced unprecedented political pressure from liberals who have smeared the conservative court and their decisions as “illegitimate.”
“The court has always decided controversial cases and decisions have always been subject to intense criticism, and that is entirely appropriate,” Roberts said this Friday, pushing back against the criticism. “But I don’t understand the connection between the opinions people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”
He addressed lawyers and judges at a fireside chat as part of the 10th Circuit Bench and Bar Conference, held in Colorado Springs.
Roberts doubled down on his defense with a stern warning. He said, “You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is. And you don’t want public opinion to be the guide of what the appropriate decision is.”
The Supreme Court has been noted to have a conservative 6-3 majority. However, the so-called conservative judges often view themselves as originalists who seek “to conserve the meaning of the Constitution as it was written,” according to Justice Neil Gorsuch’s own words.
In addition to overturning Roe v. Wade, which nationally permitted abortion through the end of the second trimester, SCOTUS also struck down a nearly century-old gun control law in New York that barred citizens from exercising their constitutional right unless they demonstrated “proper cause” for needing a concealed carry permit.
In other controversial decisions, SCOTUS struck down President Joe Biden’s narrowly targeted immigration policy and dealt a blow to his administration’s climate agenda. The conservative rulings have been heavily criticized by liberals, who accused the court of pushing a Republican agenda.
This includes Vice President Kamala Harris, who told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Friday, “I think this is an activist court.”
“We had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body as an extension of what we have decided to be, the privacy rights to which all people are entitled. And this court took that constitutional right away,” Harris said, ironically ignoring the fact that it was a radical Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that created that “constitutional right” in the first place.
While Harris stopped short of calling the court illegitimate, it plays off the words of other leading Democrats.
For example, at the end of last year, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that she supported adding four new seats to SCOTUS “to restore balance, integrity, and independence to the extremist Court that has been hijacked, politicized, and delegitimized by Republicans.”
That interview clip circulated online hours before Roberts’s discussion in Colorado.
“Lately the criticism is phrased in terms of ‘Because of these opinions, it calls into question the legitimacy of the court.’ I think it’s a mistake to view those criticisms in that way,” Roberts told conference attendees.
He added that disagreement is “not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.”