‘Enemy of the Court’ Goes Missing

What happened to Senator Whitehouse? After months of complaining, threatening, and bullying from the junior senator of Rhode Island and other liberals about the Supreme Court, President Biden’s commission on the subject just closed up shop. Before it expired, it emitted a wheeze of a report that failed to endorse court packing — or anything else. Its most startling feature is the lack of any mention of the noisiest critic of the court.So is the Ocean State oracle all cranberries and no turkey? We certainly don’t doubt the depth of his indignation. The New Yorker has described him as “a politician with a great name, a bad haircut, and a pissed-off attitude.” Yet the senator has a habit of fulminating against the high court for its alleged conservative slant, stressing the need for radical change, then stopping short of explicitly endorsing court packing.On Twitter, the senator has mocked Republicans who would amend the Constitution to mandate keeping just nine justices on the court. He framed the GOP position thusly: “We’ve packed the Court to our satisfaction and we’re not having you re-pack it!” Still, when asked yesterday by Bloomberg News whether the court should be expanded, Mr. Whitehouse merely said he was reluctant “to get out ahead of my skis in that regard.” He’s taken a tumble over that mogul before.The Wall Street Journal reckons he’s made it “his life’s work to harass the Supreme Court.” The conservative justices are pawns of “Republicans and their big donors,” the senator says, and the court is but an extension of the political arena. The GOP and “corporate, polluter and partisan donor interests,” he says, “can achieve political gains there that they cannot win in Congress.”The senator insists “Americans can smell a rat,” and “the public’s faith in the court’s independence is eroding.” In 2019, as “counsel of record” on a friend of the court filing in a gun rights case, he warned the justices that “the Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it.” Hopefully, “the Court can heal itself,” Mr. Whitehouse said, before the institution has to be “restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.”The senator later explained to the Washington Post that the filing had been offered as a friendly caution, in “the same way that you might warn somebody walking out on thin ice,” adding, “you want to be careful, maybe you want to come in.” Others saw the filing as a threat. The Journal called it “an enemy-of-the-Court brief,” saying it marked an “escalation in the Supreme Court wars.” Since then, liberal frustrations on this front have only deepened.Yet if Mr. Whitehouse and fellow liberals hoped Mr. Biden’s court commission would offer blueprints for their longed-for restructuring, they were disappointed. The report approved unanimously Tuesday by the commission’s sages avoided offering a recommendation. In that, the commission reflected the views of its creator. Although Mr. Biden had told “60 Minutes” he wanted “to reform the court system because it’s getting out of whack,” he hasn’t endorsed court packing and has opposed it in the past.The commission’s report punts on questions like whether to expand the court, as well on curbs such as term limits for justices that would require a constitutional amendment, or barring the court from overturning laws. The commission seems to delight in its own high-minded equanimity. Yet without naming names, the report offers a cautionary note on “questions of legitimacy” raised by Mr. Whitehouse and others — including Justices Breyer and Sotomayor just last week.“The relationship between popular acceptance of the Court and the correctness of the Court’s decisions is a complex question,” the report says. The commissioners add: “Competing assertions about legitimacy that do not recognize the complexity of that term can obscure, rather than focus, the terms of debate.” Good for them, even if it will have scant effect on court-haters like Mr. Whitehouse and others whose demagogic anti-Supreme Court rhetoric poses a threat to the ideal of an independent judiciary._______Image of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

‘Enemy of the Court’ Goes Missing

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