What does it tell you that last Monday, not one member of the U.S. Supreme Court attended the annual “Red Mass,” a church service celebrating the start of the court’s year, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington?
They did not go because of the threat of violence.
More than half of federal judges reported receiving death threats last year — twice as many as in 2021, according to the National Judicial College. “My life has been threatened several times, resulting in two arrests, one conviction, and the purchase of my new gun,” one federal judge recently wrote anonymously.
Another Republican-appointed judge began his ruling against the Trump administration by attaching a threat he received to his ruling in the case: “Trump has pardons and tanks — what do you have?” read the threat.
The judge, William Young, responded by writing: “Dear Mr. or Ms., Anonymous: Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States — you and me — have our magnificent Constitution.”
The rise in threats by political partisans against members of the nation’s judiciary is now an epidemic distorting the promise of equal rights under law. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s sister has received bomb threats. In 2022, a disturbed man, unhappy with the high court, was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a gun and zip-ties. He later admitted to plotting Kavanaugh’s assassination and was just sentenced recently.
Judges across the country have faced “pizza doxxing” — unsolicited food deliveries meant to signal that their addresses are known to those who wish them harm.
White House adviser Stephen Miller now tells the president’s supporters that court rulings against President Trump are acts of “legal insurrection,” asserting that the president holds “authority” that supersedes the court.
Violent threats are only one force currently smashing trust in the courts.
The biggest grind on the high court is President Trump’s constant demand for emergency rulings to escape lower court decisions against him. The result is a wave of rushed cases before the Supreme Court’s so-called “Shadow Docket.”
There have been 25 requests by the Trump administration for those emergency rulings, and the court has taken up 24. They ruled in President Trump’s favor in 21 of the cases.
Using emergency rulings, the court has allowed Trump to fire members of congressionally appointed boards, including the National Labor Relations Board. It gave Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team the right to review previously private data on the public in the Social Security system. It allowed illegal immigrants to be deported to countries where they have never been and may be tortured or executed.
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson have protested that the “emergency docket … should not be used to overrule or revise existing law.”
One legal scholar simply wrote that “Because I said so” is not acceptable for a decision from the nation’s highest court. “And it certainly should not be regarded as acceptable when it is the Supreme Court resolving important issues — even matters of life and death — without the slightest explanation … opinions convey that the justices are making reasoned decisions, not just exercising power,” wrote Erwin Chemerinsky at the SCOTUSblog website.
In other words, the court is looking like a rubber stamp for a right-wing political agenda.
This is a break with the Founding Fathers’ vision of the Supreme Court as the cop on the beat, impartially checking the Congress and the president of any party for violations of the Constitution. Instead, it looks like conservative justices are acting as bystanders — or accomplices to the erosion of the rule of law.
Late last month, Justice Clarence Thomas made an extraordinary and troubling statement in light of Trump pushing the courts to bless new, limitless powers for the executive branch. He said any previous court rulings, commonly called precedents, no longer shape future rulings.
“I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel,” Thomas said.
Thomas earlier voted to overturn half a century of precedent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ending the constitutional right to abortion. And now precedents of law may not apply to Trump. At Thomas’ confirmation hearings, he refused to say he planned to override precedents.
More damage to the court comes from reports of a possible scandal. At least three Republican-appointed justices face serious allegations of corruption. Justice Thomas has accepted lavish gifts and travel from wealthy donors with interests before the court. Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife reportedly earned over $10 million as a headhunter for elite law firms whose attorneys appear before him. No one has offered a credible denial or defense.
There is no Supreme Court army. All it has is public trust — and that base is eroding.
According to Gallup polling released this month, the Supreme Court opens its new term “with Americans’ opinions of it near record lows.” The polls found “29 percent of Americans currently say they do not have very much trust in the court, and 22 percent have none at all.”
Former Attorney General Eric Holder is telling Democrats that they “cannot simply allow this Court to continue” in its current form. He is urging Supreme Court reform — including term limits and possible expansion beyond nine members.
If the justices will not restore integrity to the institution, then Congress will have to save the court from itself.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”