Crom Carmichael and Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Tennessee Star, said lawmakers and entities on the Left are attempting to discredit the U.S. Supreme Court as the nation’s highest court hands down decisions in cases that the Left strongly disagrees with.
“There’s a lot of effort now by the left to try to discredit certain Supreme Court justices individually and then to also discredit the Supreme Court as an institution. The left will elevate the Supreme Court institutionally back when the Supreme Court rubber stamps what the left wants. Right now, they’re not getting what they want so now they are attacking individual Supreme Court justices for tiny things,” Carmichael explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Leahy noted that while the Supreme Court has not made “good decisions” in some of its rulings, he said he believes it is important that the nation continues to respect the court.
“It is very important that the Supreme Court is respected around the country because it’s the final authority, the Supreme Court itself. There have been periods of time where it’s not made very good decisions,” Leahy said, noting how the Supreme Court ruled in decisions that “basically established the bureaucracy of the administrative state.”
“Yet as a society, America, generally, respects the final decisions,” Leahy added.
Carmichael said that while he agrees with the principle of respecting the Supreme Court and its rulings, he pointed out that the Biden administration actively ignores Supreme Court rulings if it does not align with his and his party’s views.
“When Biden doesn’t get the final decision he wants, he does pretty much what he wants to anyway, especially on the student loan debt, for example. Now, what they’re trying to do is to attack individual justices for things,” Carmichael said.
“If you only trust Supreme Court decisions that you agree with, then the Supreme Court ceases to exist. It becomes a rubber stamp,” Carmichael added. “The Supreme Court has to take the cases that are presented. That’s what they do. They take the cases that are presented and even if five out of nine justices think there is a law on the books that is unconstitutional, unless a case is presented to them with that law at issue, they can’t change any law that exists. Because that’s not what its role is under the constitution.”
Carmichael went on to stress the importance of the three branches of government, noting how the Founding Fathers’ goal was to establish a functioning national government with constraints.
“We have three independent branches of government. You have the executive branch, which is headed by the president. You have the legislative branch, which is the Congress. That’s the House and the Senate. Then you have the judicial branch. Now, the House sets the rules for the House. The Senate sets the rules for the Senate and the executive branch, I’m not going to say it sets the rules for the executive branch because the president does that. Then the judiciary has always set its own policies and its own standards of ethics,” Carmichael explained.
“It started with a group of people who wanted to do two things at the same time. One was to establish a functioning national government, and the other was to constrain that national government and put constraints on it,” Carmichael added.
Leahy, offering a positive perspective on the issue, said, “When you look, although this system of government has been tested and is frayed right now, if you look at the founding fathers and the development of the constitution and the thought that went behind it, it is perhaps the most amazing intellectual achievement in history.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
