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Coordinated attacks on SCOTUS’s integrity, led by Democrats and their allies in the corporate media, try to deceive Americans into believing partisans hijacked the highest court in the land and ideologically fractured it into near-dysfunction. The prominence of unanimous opinions and even more unanimous judgments not only discredits this notion but suggests a far more concerning narrative about the politicization of lower courts.
Since its inception, the Supreme Court has wielded its authority to deliver decisions rooted in bench agreement. In recent years, especially, justices “defied critics” with “historic unanimity” on cases that circuit, appeals, and state supreme courts decided in defiance of the Constitution. Of the 32 cases already decided in the 2023 term, 21 of the judgments were agreed upon by all of the presiding justices. Many of them signaled justices’ concern that lower courts abused their ruling power to violate the Constitution.
In the unanimous ruling on former President Donald Trump’s ballot eligibility in Colorado, Justice Amy Coney Barrett signaled that “the message Americans should take home” was the justices’ undivided conclusion.
“For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine justices agree on the outcome of this case,” she wrote.
Scoldings like these are not are not uncommon. Nor are reminders that lower courts do not have unrestricted authority to rule as they please.
In the unanimously decided National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, Justice Neil Gorsuch warned in his concurring opinion that benches like the Second Circuit have become too comfortable weaponizing legal devices like the “four-pronged ‘multifactor test’” to secure a certain ruling instead of contextualizing them as a “useful, though nonexhaustive, guide,” as the Supreme Court deemed them to be.
“Lower courts would therefore do well to heed this Court’s directive: Whatever value these ‘guideposts’ serve, they remain ‘just’ that and nothing more,” Gorsuch wrote.
In the NRA case, every justice on the high bench agreed that the Second Circuit should have examined the actions of gun control-crazed New York state officials as “reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff ’s speech.”
Justices’ agreement and analysis of this behavior confirms that the lower courts — not the highest court in the land, as the propaganda press routinely suggests — have “gone off the rails.”
Inferior circuit and district courts in overwhelmingly blue areas know this and have allowed it to fuel their capitulation to partisanship and misconduct so irreprehensible that it requires a swift and firm reaction from SCOTUS.
The spike in poorly ruled cases can be easily traced back to courts staffed and run by judges who have a blatant disrespect for the Constitution and a penchant for lying to Congress. President Joe Biden’s concerning list of judicial nominees, which seems to satisfy Democrats’ race and sex quotas, only exacerbates the chaos and dereliction that will inevitably send bad lower court decisions straight to the highest court in the land.
The problem with this alarming activism is that it continues unhindered if and until the Supreme Court has time to review and issue a decision. This delay makes it difficult for Americans whose constitutional rights have been targeted and trampled, like Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, to secure justice.
The Supreme Court’s recent string of unanimous decisions not only serves as a reminder that corporate media are deliberately deceptive, but also suggests that lower courts are abusing their power to achieve partisan and, more importantly, unconstitutional results.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
