The Democrats, who control Congress, are tripping over themselves in a race to condemn yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding Congress’s own law banning partial-birth abortions. “It is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that I warned against when I opposed the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito,” Senator Clinton harrumphed. “I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women,” Senator Obama protested.

What a confederacy of wimps. The leaders of the party in control of the Congress are complaining that the Supreme Court has ruled they have the power to make the abortion laws. It’s mind-boggling. Instead of relying on a Republican Supreme Court to uphold abortion rights, the Democrats in Congress could just repeal the partial-birth abortion ban, which was passed when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Or if they don’t want to repeal the entire law, they could just insert a provision allowing the procedure when it is necessary to safeguard the health of a pregnant woman; they could even define when it is medically necessary, which is a point of contention.

But no, they don’t want to. They don’t dare to. The problem the Democrats face is that the procedure at hand is so brutal and so morally problematic for so many that when the partial-birth abortion ban came before Congress for votes back in 2003, many Democrats voted for the ban, and against the procedure. They included some of the party’s senior figures, among them Senators Daschle, Byrd, Leahy, and Reid. The 2003 vote was at least the fifth the Senate had taken on the procedure, and the fifth time the ban won a simple majority. And now the Supreme Court has had the audacity to support the Congress’s authority.

Earlier votes included other prominent Democrats who voted for the ban. In a May 20, 1997, vote, Senators Biden and Moynihan sided with Senators Leahy, Daschle, Byrd, and Reid in opposing the procedure. Senators Biden, Leahy, Reid, and Moynihan voted on September 26, 1996, to override President Clinton’s veto of the ban. Moynihan and Messrs. Reid and Biden had voted for the ban on December 7, 1995. A vote that same day on an amendment by Senator Boxer put that California Democrat as well as such well-known left-wingers as Senators Kennedy, Kerry, and Feingold on record as favoring a ban of the procedure so long as an exception was made for when it was medically necessary to preserve the health or fertility of the mother. Senators Moynihan, Biden, Byrd, Leahy, and Reid voted for the ban again on October 21, 1999.

The only justices in the majority who seemed prepared to let the Congress off the hook were those two notorious Democrats, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. In a clever concurring opinion, they suggested that, if they had their druthers, they might have just struck down the ban as an overreach of congressional authority under the Commerce Clause. The implication is that abortion is a matter that under the Constitution is left to the states. That, in some sense, will be the practical effect of the majority decision, which virtually invites individual women plaintiffs who think their health requires a partial-birth abortion to rush into court — albeit federal District Courts — to seek exceptions.

But the majority opinion defers to Congress’s judgment. What a pickle. The justices in the minority — Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer — fume that “the notion that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act furthers any legitimate governmental interest is, quite simply, irrational.” Thanks to the accession of Justices Roberts and Alito, at least a majority of the nine understand that their job isn’t to decide whether the laws passed by Congress are rational, but whether they are constitutional. For those justices Americans have President Bush to thank. If Congress acts to overturn the ban, it could meet a presidential veto. At least then the Democrats in Congress could stop complaining about the justices’ failure to overturn the law so many of them voted to pass.