In the last few months, we’ve watched as a U.S. senator has reintroduced a bill with ten cosponsors to restructure the Supreme Court, the House Minority Leader has called a Court majority “illegitimate,” and the president has attacked the very justices he appointed for ruling against him. Meanwhile, two justices appeared before the House to ask for millions in extra security funding; one of them told of how she has had to explain to her children what a bulletproof vest is and why she is forced to wear one. In view of these events, it’s worth taking a moment to remember why the Court still deserves our confidence — and our defense.
The Founders did not create the federal judiciary as an afterthought — they made it an independent branch precisely because they anticipated moments like this one, when politically unpopular rulings would tempt the other branches to retaliate. Alexander Hamilton, one of the principal advocates of the Constitution, understood that the judiciary “is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its co-ordinate branches.” Lifetime tenure and salary protection under Article III of the Constitution exist for this very reason: to allow judges to decide cases on the law, not on which political faction controls Congress or the White House. An independent judiciary was never designed to be popular in real time; it was designed to be a check that operates regardless of public sentiment. The current moment — a Court ruling against a sitting president’s signature tariff and birthright citizenship policies, with some of his own appointees joining the majority in those cases — is Article III working exactly as designed, not evidence that something is broken. The same can be said for what might be considered conservative-coded rulings: for example, the decision prohibiting racial gerrymandering from this past term and, even more controversially, the 2022 decision overruling Roe v. Wade.
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