This holiday weekend, the Supreme Court must still command respect
Lori Lightfoot has reminded us that she is not the first Chicago mayor to use profanity. Rahm Emanuel was known for his mouth, and Richard M. Daley also had a fine command of expletives, albeit usually confined to behind closed doors.
Still, it’s hard to imagine either of those predecessors, let alone Richard J. Daley, publicly shouting a common expletive down a microphone and in the direction of an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, as Lightfoot did with Clarence Thomas.
“F—- Clarence Thomas,” the mayor said at a Pride in the Park event last weekend.
Many people are upset at the decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision we have lamented. The impact, which led to abortion providers suspending operations in several states, will be palpable, and Americans are fully justified in using their free speech to complain and march in protest. And there’s no restriction on the available rhetoric.
But when you’re the mayor of the third largest city, and a lawyer to boot, it behooves you to moderate your tone and keep things out of the personal realm, even in the issue of abortion politics.
When lawyers lose a case, they typically say little more than that they are disappointed in the verdict and plan to appeal. They don’t attack the court as an institution because they know that legal and civic proceedings are long races with many jumps, that horses often change jockeys and that intemperate rhetoric after one race can help you lose the next one. Plus there is a general sense that attacking America’s judiciary in totem undermines the necessary machinery of democracy.
Lightfoot, of course, was hardly alone. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has described the court’s recent cumulative actions as a “Constitutional crisis.”
“We are witnessing a judicial coup in process,” she tweeted Thursday. It’s all exaggerated red meat for her supporters but deeply unhelpful to the cause of democracy and complex thinking. It’s the kind of flame-throwing rhetoric that only ignites the extremes on the other side.
People have disagreed with Supreme Court decisions as long as there has been a Supreme Court. The return of Roe to the states was a mistake but hardly some anti-democratic act, given that Congress is now free to pass laws defining a federal right to an abortion, if its duly elected representatives only choose to do so. And, as we have noted, states now can take these matters into their own hands. And so they should.
Americans can influence the composition of the Supreme Court by voting for presidents who they think will appoint the best justices. They are free to debate the composition of the court, to propose amending its size, to attempt to install term limits on its members. All of these efforts, undertaken within established constitutional protocols, are fair game.
But that’s all far removed from elected officials attacking Thomas in a personal way. The Supreme Court was designed to be the final arbiter of legal matters. That’s why it’s called the Supreme Court. To attack the judges, rather than the decision, is inappropriate. The appropriate response was for Lightfoot to tell the crowd that she disagreed with the decision, vehemently so, and suggest remedies within our democratic way of doing things. To his credit, that was the tack Gov. J.B. Pritzker took.
Independence Day weekend is a good time to take stock of America, and, as flags are raised, hot dogs steamed and burgers grilled, it’s not an especially settled accounting. The country is becoming ever more balkanized, crucial institutions are being undermined for partisan gain and zero-sum rhetoric is starting to dominate.
Some things we find to be self-evident. Presidents should not cajole and encourage a violent mob to attack a cherished building, harming those who work there, all in service of what has been proved, time and again, to be a lie.
Similarly, especially on the current matter of abortion, Americans must accept that not every legal decision in a democracy is going to go their way. Fighting for change does not mean refusing to accept the verdict of the highest court in the land, personally attacking its members or burning down all that the republic has achieved.
We’ll wager many gatherings this weekend will involve discussions of the state of the nation, the lack of unity, the abandonment of crucial democratic values and the lack of belief in the impartiality of the machinery needed to run any democratic nation. If that’s your crew, we hope the weather stays nice for you, and your conversations turn to the encouragement of tolerance and the provision not just of ketchup, but of shared solutions.