There is no version of the Supreme Court that Democrats and their supporters in the press will be happy with that is not explicitly liberal and explicitly pro-Democratic Party.
In their minds, it is either a court of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson-types advocating for the most obviously unconstitutional policies that favor Democratic power, or the court is illegitimate and its rulings are anti-democracy.
Never mind the conservative justices' histories of voting with the court's liberal bloc -- a phenomenon that goes the other way much less frequently. Never mind also that this court has ruled many times against the Trump administration's executive overreach.
For liberals, it's all or nothing.
We've seen this narrative play out these past several years. When the press are not outright mischaracterizing Supreme Court rulings in ways that come just shy of libelous, fringe left-wing commentators, who are increasingly the mainstream of the liberal commentariat, are calling for the court to be reformed, packed, or for conservative justices to be impeached.
Just look at the wild-eyed reaction to the court's decision last week in Louisiana v. Callais. The justices ruled 6-3 that Louisiana had acted outside its legal authority when it gerrymandered a congressional district along racial lines. Put more simply, the Supreme Court held that legislators cannot engage in race-based gerrymandering because such practices are themselves a form of racial discrimination.
That seems straightforward enough. Yet you would think, based on the press coverage, that the court had repealed the 14th amendment.
"The Supreme Court struck down a majority black congressional district in Louisiana, weakening a landmark voting rights law's protections against discrimination in redistricting," declared the Associated Press.
Reported NPR: "The U.S. Supreme Court strikes another severe blow to the Voting Rights Act."
"US Supreme Sourt 'demolishes' Voting Rights Act,: said the Guardian, "gutting provision that prevented racial discrimination."
The accompanying media commentary was also exactly what you'd expect.
"The Supreme Court Has Completed Its Quest to Kill The Voting Rights Act," wrote the Nation's Elie Mystal in his typical apocryphal style.
At the New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie argued it's racist to disallow race-based gerrymandering.
"Allowing for racial gerrymandering, as long as there's some fake leaf of neutrality, is basically the way Jim Crow worked," he moaned.
Not to get too far afield from the main topic, but weren't we just in the middle of a national conversation about how gerrymandering is bad? Are we now introducing the idea of good gerrymandering?
As for the New York Times itself, its editorial board argued last week that the Supreme Court justices "acted as partisans in the voting rights ruling."
Then there was ex-MSNBC presenter Medhi Hasan, who repeated the well-worn call for the court to be demolished -- I mean reformed. "If the Democrats don't make rebalancing and expanding the Supreme Court a top priority for whenever (if?) they next get into power, then I don't know what to say anymore. The GOP-packed court is the biggest block on progress in this country and has been for a while."
But the reaction last week was only partly about the ruling. If the histrionics felt a bit flat, or if you suspected critics were mostly going through the motions, that's because they were. It is not so much the ruling they object to as the Supreme Court itself.
From the moment the Supreme Court gained a conservative majority in 2020, Democrats and left-wing commentators have been waging a non-stop campaign to delegitimize it. There wasn't even a honeymoon period. Allegations of tyranny and illegitimacy have been the reflexive response to every decision from this court, regardless of the legal merits.
Even if they believed the court had gotten the Louisiana ruling right, they would never admit it. They can't let up. The campaign to undermine and overthrow the independent judiciary requires a relentless barrage of slanders, innuendo, criticism, and hand-wringing. Any suggestion that the court is not made up of devils would undermine this years-long effort.
Thus, we now have liberal justices breaking precedent and publicly attacking their conservative counterparts. And these attacks follow a Supreme Court staffer's early leak of the highly controversial Dobbs decision, which prompted major backlash, protests, and even an assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Speaking of which, all this talk of so-called "reform" and court-packing comes after the intensive effort to destroy Kavanaugh -- an effort run in the same style as the campaigns that derailed the nominations of Robert Bork and Miguel Estrada and nearly destroyed Clarence Thomas.
The effort against Kavanaugh also came within the context of the highly orchestrated, and sometimes left-wing-funded, media campaigns to discredit Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito with spurious allegations of far-right sympathies and too-cozy relationships with billionaire Republican donors.
What's especially remarkable is that this effort to undermine and tear down the entire institution comes right after liberals enjoyed decades of judicial victories in the Supreme Court -- thanks in large part to the long-running trend of Republican-nominated justices siding with the court's lockstep liberal bloc. And the Democratic-nominated bloc really is in lockstep compared to its conservative counterpart.
For 40 years, it has been clear that Republican-nominated justices are more likely to peel off and side with the liberal bloc than the other way around.
Today's court is as conservative as it has been in about a century. Since that time, Democrats have both dominated the court and enjoyed all the benefits of moderate Republican-nominated justices crossing over to rule in their favor.
But now that there is no impressionable Anthony Kennedy, no pliant John Paul Stevens to go along with the rest of the liberal bloc. Now that Justice Thomas has at least one more justice who will vote with him as reliably as Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor vote with each other -- well, now we have to rethink the entire judiciary!
It is no accident that every swing vote on the court these last 40 years was a Republican nominee.
Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.