Five Times Democrats Insisted The Supreme Court Must Be Obeyed Without Question
Less than 24 hours after a leaked Dobbs v. Jackson opinion indicated that the United States Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden threatened to use his executive authority to disrespect the decision.
In a statement released on Tuesday morning, Biden cast doubt on the finality of the court’s Dobbs ruling and pledged to use his Gender Policy Council and White House Counsel’s Office to counter “the continued attack on abortion and reproductive rights, under a variety of possible outcomes.”
“We will be ready when any ruling is issued,” he said.
Biden also encouraged legislators and other elected politicians to dismiss the ruling.
“If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November,” he said.
The Biden administration’s reaction to the leaked SCOTUS opinion is a far cry from how Democrats have treated the court’s integrity with other cases, especially those that fell in their favor.
For years, Democrats have defended poor rulings from the high court as the “law of the land” because it moved the ball on their agenda. Now that one of the key tenants of their political platform is threatened, such as in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, leftists are calling for violence and even a radical revamping of the American political system including abolishing the Electoral College, nuking the filibuster, packing the court, voting pro-lifers out of office, and disregarding future rulings altogether.
Aside from Roe v. Wade, here are five strongly contested Supreme Court decisions that Democrats insisted must be accepted without doubt or question.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey
Ever since Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided in 1992, Democrats and activist organizations have used the ruling as ammo to promote abortion as an unchallengeable “right.”
Planned Parenthood, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and even Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, all Biden allies, have long claimed that what the Supreme Court has settled on abortion, let no man touch.
“Roe and Casey are the settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate a woman’s pregnancy,” Jackson, Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, told senators during her confirmation hearings.
Biden’s own Department of Justice recently invoked Planned Parenthood v. Casey to claim that Texas, which passed a pro-life heartbeat law in September, was violating a woman’s “constitutional right” to an abortion.
“The act is clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. “Those precedents hold, in the words of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that ‘regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.’”
National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius
Because Chief Justice John Roberts caved to activist pressure and sided with leftist SCOTUS justices to uphold Obamacare in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius in 2012, Democrats have defended the decision with vigor and even smeared future justices such as Amy Coney Barrett as a threat to the court’s already established position.
When former President Donald Trump’s administration led the charge to repeal Obamacare, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed Republicans were “trying to overturn the law of the land in courts.”
Plenty of other Democrats jumped on the “law of the land” bandwagon to protect Obamacare as well.
“Obamacare is the law of the land — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Once again, we’ve defended health care for millions of Americans. Proud to have stood with my fellow
@DemocraticAGs in this fight,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro tweeted after the Supreme Court dismissed an Obamacare challenge.
Obergefell v. Hodges
Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that states must recognize same-sex marriage, Democrats once again claimed that it was the “law of the land” and even used the ruling as a launching pad to try to legalize religious bigotry and prioritize identity politics above the law.
Corporate media even suggested that the SCOTUS decision in Obergefell is threatened by the court itself.
“Same-sex marriage at risk as Supreme Court gets more conservative,” one CNN headline from October 2020 states.
“How safe is gay marriage? Advocates fear increasingly conservative court,” NBC News also wrote about the same time Trump nominated Barrett to the court.
Bostock v. Clayton County
A similar reaction surfaced after the Supreme Court’s leftist justices, joined by Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, rewrote Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to state that the prohibition of employment discrimination based on “sex” includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
The ruling was heralded as a victory for “equality” despite the fact that it degraded Americans’ natural rights.
“There is no question: LGBTQ people are protected from discrimination in the workplace,” ACLU tweeted shortly after the ruling, with others once again parroting “law of the land” language.
Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of The University of California
When Roberts once again sided with the court’s leftist justices to uphold the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, SCOTUS was accused of holding different legal standards for different presidents.
Democrats, including then-Sen. Kamala Harris, defended the ruling anyway and claimed that Trump’s attempts to phase out DACA were violating the court’s ruling.
Even the court’s inaction on issues such as Covid-19 shot mandates at universities and election integrity has historically been regarded by Democrats as the final say on those matters.
To Democrats, Supreme Court rulings are only the “law of the land” when those rulings benefit them and their political agenda. The minute the court decides an outcome different than the left’s desired outcome, the latter says it’s suddenly OK to question the court’s integrity.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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