Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked by CNN, “Do you have confidence in the Supreme Court?”
“No,” she said. “I think they have gone rogue. It’s most unfortunate.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, similarly found occasion to expound on the integrity of the judicial system, Politico reports. “Today is a shameful day in American history,” he said after Donald Trump’s felony convictions in New York for falsifying records. “This was a purely political exercise, not a legal one.” The country’s left and right flanks — endlessly divided on nearly every big question — have arrived at a striking convergence: Both ends of the political spectrum believe the U.S. justice system is simply not on the level. The notion that the nation’s legal system, from the Supreme Court down, is hopelessly compromised by bias and scantily clad partisan agendas is now a foundational assumption across wide swaths of both the conservative and progressive movements.
A phenomenon that has reached an apogee in 2024 is new. The ever-more aggressive declarations of judicial illegitimacy differ from the political complaints of the past not just in degree, but also in kind. Not long algo, the casual assertion of judicial illegitimacy would have been shocking from a former and current speaker. These days, the argument that the justice system is so distorted by politics that in fundamental ways it cannot and should not be trusted reflects mainstream thinking in major political parties. Before Trump's New York trial, many Democrats privately winced that the charges — which were elevated from misdemeanors to felonies using an unusual legal theory — might not be the strongest case to make their point that Trump is a lawless president. Yet after the guilty verdict, those same Democrats publicly scold conservatives for maintaining that the whole exercise was unfair and would not have been brought against any defendant not named Trump. Many of those Democrats have defended Hunter Biden, who similarly was convicted of charges that never would have attracted a special prosecutor if his last name were different.