Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote a Washington Post op-ed Monday pushing back on Democrats’ recent attacks on the Supreme Court, calling them a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the court.
The op-ed follows Senate Democrats’ announcement that they will attempt to push a Supreme Court ethics bill in the coming days in the wake of ethics controversies surrounding multiple justices and a series of landmark rulings.
McConnell, who has made confirming conservative judges a hallmark of his tenure, discussed at length the justices’ voting patterns this term while insisting that the court’s defining characteristic was a “politically unpredictable center.”
“These escalating attacks from the left betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the court’s structure and purpose,” McConnell wrote. “It is an ideologically unpredictable body that takes cases as they come and produces diverse outcomes. Recent rulings put that reality in stark relief.”
The high court handed down several considerable conservative legal victories this term along 6-3 ideological lines, including blocking President Biden’s student debt relief plan, ending affirmative action in college admissions and siding with a Christian web designer who refused to make same-sex wedding websites.
But the court’s conservative supermajority also split at times on major cases.
McConnell noted the Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map as well as lower-profile unanimous and near-unanimous decisions.
The Senate GOP leader noted that of the Supreme Court’s granted cases this term, roughly 45 percent were unanimous and less than 10 percent fell along ideological lines.
The court’s critics note that those statistics do not account for the thousands of appeals the justices decline to hear each year without publicly indicating their votes.
“Some ‘MAGA Supreme Court,’” McConnell wrote, referencing a tweet from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) criticizing the court when it ruled against the Biden administration in a major environmental case.
In a “Dear Colleague” letter circulated publicly Sunday, Schumer similarly called the court “MAGA-captured” as he referenced ProPublica’s recent reporting into undisclosed luxury trips accepted by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Schumer pledged that Senate Democrats will consider all means at their disposal to pressure the court to take steps to reform its ethical practices, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has vowed to mark up an ethics bill in the next few weeks.
McConnell’s op-ed only vaguely referenced the ethics push and did not specifically mention recent questions surrounding the justices. However, the Kentucky Republican has previously expressed confidence in the court, including Thomas, amid rising pressure from the left.
“Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are trying to tell a coequal branch of government how to manage its internal operations, ostensibly to clean up its ‘ethics,’” McConnell wrote.
McConnell also noted how after the affirmative action decision Biden proclaimed, “this is not a normal court.”
“On that count, he is correct — it is, as Article III of the Constitution put it, ‘supreme,’” McConnell wrote.
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