If you spent a few minutes skimming recent headlines of left-wing media outlets and press releases from Democratic Party politicians, you might conclude — wrongly — that the U.S. Supreme Court is full of corrupt ideologues.
Justice Samuel Alito, they claim, is entirely compromised to the point that he cannot sit for any case involving highly controversial matters because his wife flew two flags: the historic “Appeal to Heaven” flag and the U.S. flag upside down in a sign of distress.
Justice Clarence Thomas, they claim, is so corrupt that he eagerly takes vacations and gifts from a billionaire in exchange for conservative rulings from the bench on any possible issue that could be imagined.
These baseless attacks are entirely aimed at delegitimizing the court’s standing in the eyes of the public. Aiding in this endeavor are congressional Democrats, as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) sought to haul Chief Justice John Roberts before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a brazen attack on the separation of powers.
But if you look at the rulings that the justices actually hand down, a different story emerges than the one painted by Durbin and his friends. Alito and Thomas, the supposedly committed and corrupt partisans they are, just joined a unanimous ruling in a case that the Left was convinced would end access to mifepristone, the standard drug that induces abortions early in pregnancy.
The case was brought by a group of pro-life doctors who argued that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone more than two decades ago violated the agency’s own rules and should be revoked. But the court, in its unanimous opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue and dismissed the case.
Pro-life organizations expressed dismay at the ruling, noting the drug’s harmful effects, but said that litigation will continue as three states have sought to replace the coalition of doctors as the lead plaintiffs in the case.
“The use of mifepristone to end human life in the womb continues to be illegal in over a dozen states, and the act of mailing these pills into those states continues to be illegal under federal law,” Americans United for Life general counsel Steven Aden said in a statement. “We expect that when the lower courts take up this matter again, they will have to reckon with the consequences of a federal regime that permits the use of a drug that remains unlawful under most circumstances.”
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That very well may happen at some point down the line, but Thursday’s ruling yet again shows that the court’s conservative majority is not so ideologically rigid as Democrats and left-wing activists make it out to be.
The judicial record that Alito and Thomas have accumulated over their many years on the Supreme Court bench is one of restraint and strict adherence to the law and the Constitution, even when that leads them to conclusions they may otherwise disagree with. The latest ruling in the mifepristone case only underscores that.