Below is my column on Fox.com on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declaring the Supreme Court “illegitimate.” It is a statement that has dangerously moved beyond the mere hyperbolic as Democrats push to pack or even eliminate the Court.
Here is the column:
The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais took 36 pages to explain why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is about combating intentional racial discrimination, not allowing racial gerrymandering. However, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrapped it up in one word: “illegitimate.”
Jeffries was not speaking of the case, but the Court. The man who would become the next Speaker of the House if Democrats retake power in November has joined other radicals in denying the legitimacy of the nation’s highest court.
Just for the record, the Supreme Court did not strike down Section 2, but said that neither the law nor the Constitution allows legislators to manipulate district lines to guarantee that candidates of a particular race will be elected. It was written not to give any race an advantage, but to prevent a state from creating a disadvantage to voters based on their race. The Act prevents any State from intentionally drawing districts “to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”
This is a matter upon which people of good faith can disagree. Many of the justices have been long opposed to racial criteria in areas ranging from college admissions to voting districts. Chief Justice John Roberts stated it bluntly in 2006 that “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Like others, Roberts abhors racial discrimination but declared in another case that “way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
You will find no such distinctions in much of the press where experts declared the death of equal voting laws in America. UCLA Law Professor Richard Hasen dispenses with any nuance and simply ran a Slate column titled “The Slaying of the Voting Rights Act by the Coward Alito.”
For years, liberal law professors have been trashing conservative justices, including Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who called them “partisan hacks.”
However, the name-calling has mutated into a movement to scrap the Court or the Constitution, or both. Chemerinsky wrote a book recently titled “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) joined Jeffries in calling for changing the Supreme Court after the decision: “we’re going to have to try to transform the way the Supreme Court has been gerrymandered itself and stacked and packed with MAGA appointees.”
There was, of course, no such movement during the decades with a liberal majority that set aside an array of long-standing cases. It was only when a stable conservative majority emerged that law professors declared the Court illegitimate or dangerous, with many calling for packing the Court with an instant liberal majority once Democrats retake power.
I discuss some of these voices as the “new Jacobins” in my book Rage and the Republic, figures echoing the radical concepts or means used in France before what became known as “The Terror.”
Law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale have called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Last December, they published a column titled “It’s Time to Accept that the US Supreme Court is Illegitimate and Must be Replaced.”
They insist that citizens must be rid of this meddlesome court: “remaking institutions like the US supreme court so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised.”
Many Democrats realize that the public is rather attached to both the Constitution and its core institutions. That is why various Democratic politicians and pundits have been pledging to pack the Court once they are back in power. Some have suggested that, if they are going to change the political system and retain power, they will have to do it with the help of a compliant Court.
Democratic strategist James Carville stated matter-of-factly, “They’re going to recommend that the number of Supreme Court justices go from nine to 13. That’s going to happen, people.” He added recently, “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
To do that, you must first delegitimate the Court. You must attack both the individual justices and the institution itself. You need true rage to get a people to tear apart the core institution of a Republic on its 250th anniversary.
Now you have the next possible Speaker of the United States declaring the Supreme Court illegitimate because he disagrees with its interpretation of the law.
What these figures do not mention is that the majority of opinions by the Supreme Court are unanimous or nearly unanimous. A comparably few cases break along strict ideological 6-3 lines. Indeed, just last week, it was President Donald Trump who was denouncing the conservative justices as disloyal and weak for, again, ruling against his Administration.
It is not the voting record nor the underlying interpretations that are motivating this campaign of delegitimation. It is power. Former Attorney General Eric Holder explained it most clearly recently in pushing the packing plan after the Democrats retake power: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power, if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
United States, having taken office on January 20, 2025. Throughout his political career, he has faced numerous security incidents, including assassination attempts,, plots, and death threats.Below is a summary of major, publicly documented threats and security incidents involving Donald Trump, based on available reports as of April 2026.Major Assassination Attempts and Plots (2024–2026)2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Gunshots at the event resulted in a security evacuation and suspect apprehension.Feb. 2026 Mar-a-Lago Shooting: Secret Service killed a man armed with a shotgun on the Mar-a-Lago grounds.Oct. 2024 Coachella Incident: A suspect was apprehended near a rally with weapons and multiple false IDs.Sept. 2024 West Palm Beach Attempt: Ryan Routh was apprehended after pointing a rifle near Trump’s Florida golf course.July 2024 Butler Shooting: Thomas Crooks shot at a Pennsylvania rally, injuring the former president and others before being killed.Iran-Linked Threats: Multiple plots, including a murder-for-hire scheme, were reported involving operatives linked to Iran.Additional Recorded Threats and Security IncidentsActive Threats: Reports include a 2026 NC threat leading to a business evacuation, a 2025 arrest for death threats in Indiana, and a 2025 conviction over a fabricated shooting threat.Historical Incidents: Past cases include mailings of ricin to the White House (2020, 2018), a 2017 forklift attack attempt, and 2016 incidents involving a gun grab attempt and rushing the stage.Security Breaches: Incidents included 2025/2026 lapses at golf clubs and a 2025 security breach at the Ryder Cup.Violations: A 2026 flight violated the Mar-a-Lago no-fly zone, prompting an interception
Does anyone remember when Turley waxed poetic about how the alleged ideological 6-3 split was not a thing?
Well, in landmark cases such as this, it certainly is. He seems to have abandoned that refrain.
The problem is that the self-professed originalists on the Court only use it when it suits their desired political ends. This opinion looks like it could have been written by an adherent to living Constitutionalism, like Brandeis, with its reliance on changing times since 1982 requiring a different interpretation. Of course, he made the claim, without evidence, that race and party are apparently more correlated now than they used to be.
When the supposedly apolitical Justices of the Supreme Court have zero consistency in their application of jurisprudential philosophy, and the only throughline to their opinions is the political outcome, then it illegitimizes the Supreme Court.
The takeover of the democrat party is a train wreck, Jeffries is the engineer and now Herr Platner in the caboose. JFK must be rolling.
“It is a statement that has dangerously moved beyond the mere hyperbolic as Democrats push to pack or even eliminate the Court.”
Wow, talk about being overdramatic. Professor Turley sure loves to overhype for the conservative crowd. The ruling is indeed bad. Conservatives have been wanting to weaken or get rid of the voting rights act.
Forget what conservatives want. Stop basing decisions on results and look at the law, the facts and the Constitution.
You mean like the self-professed originalist Alito suddenly embracing a living Constitution?
You live to destroy the good. You will pay a terrible price. Laken Riley knows who you are. You’ve trampled her grave. You cannot escape her spirit. You are evil trolling the earth seeking to destroy whatever you find.
You cannot laugh. You cannot even laugh. Can you? Fool!
So, by your statement, you are for gerrymandering based on skin color. Hmmm. That would make you a racist, wouldn’t it?
Once again, Our system of government has prevailed. The founder’s division into co-equal branches was designed specifically to bar men like jeffries from power.
The corrupt credentialed classes are about to tear the country apart in pursuit of permanent power. I hope the law “scholars” are happy. But they should remember that the second group of targets in any revolution are usually the initiators of the revolution; done in by their own devil spawn.
Dear Mr. Turley, I sure appreciate Mr. Allen’s and GEB’s thoughts on this subject. Is anyone surprised that this happened? The answer is, “No”. Nothing happened when Mr. Schumer made his threats towards two of the justices, so it just kept on snowballing. It is almost impossible to stop the Democrats’ threats now.
Nobody hates “democracy” more than Democrats when they don’t have absolute power. Democrats view themselves as morally superior to everyone else, so any questioning of their motives, their desires, their whims, is abhorrent. This is no different than the National Socialists in the 1930s, who decided that they knew what was best for Germany, and removed any obstruction to their quest for absolute power. Sounds exactly like what Fascists like Carville are screaming for.
“Everything I don’t like is illegitimate! Waaahh!” < this is the extent and current state of democrats' politics.
Hell Yeah – Power to the People – as long as it is Leftist People!!! Gotta fight the MAN when your team is not the MAN!!! The best is Dem Scumbags have the audacity to ask why our Nation is so polarized and that DJT busted all the NORMS???? Nah, the Dems were NORM BUSTING long before DJT came on the scene! Harry Reid cracked the door on doing away with historical protocol once Barry needed to get his judicial appointments packed on to the Fed Courts. Nancy P was happy begin the use of budget reconciliation to JAM the ACA down Americas throat and then keep using it! Now the Revisionist Amnestic Leftist Dems are claiming these techniques are a “THREAT TO DEMOCRACY (or do they mean DEMOCRATS)” and more extreme measures are needed to lock in Soviet Style Rule – by their party of course.
Here’s a quote from Curtis Hill at The Federalist: Self-government strengthens when it treats citizens as equals under the law, not as members of competing racial tribes.
Setting aside the fact that we are a Representative Republic and not a Democracy, complete, permanent single party rule is the farthest thing from either.
Representative govt IS a form of democracy, derp. Why do you dumbasses keep trying to impress people by claiming (wrongly) that “we’re-not-a-democracy-we’re-a-representative-republic”? Stupidest point ever.
Hakeem Jeffries has, by virtue of this statement, clearly and egregiously violated his Oath of Office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and should be immediately impeached, convicted, and removed from office on that basis. Unfortunately, my expectation is that the spineless, gutless Congressional Republicans will make no serious attempt to do this, in spite of the obvious justification.
“”I, Hakeem Jeffries, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
Oops! /|\ This was me, I Don Wannutono /|\
In jeffries defense, that’s a lot of words to understand and he’s an idiot.
“In jeffries defense, that’s a lot of words to understand and he’s an idiot.”
If you are seriously citing that as a legitimate defense of Jeffries, you are the idiot. You might better claim that his IQ and vocabulary prohibited him from understanding the oath he swore. That is not satisfactory, either, but it is a h311 of a lot more plausible than what you wrote. The point of my post, btw, was not to prove that he is an idiot, that is self-evident, but to demonstrate that he clearly must be removed from office by the standards of the very document he swore to uphold.
You rock!
Gee, now everyone has to go back to appealing to all voters and not just to people that look like you or sound like you.
I supported the voting rights act and the civil rights act of the 1960’s because they were right for the time. Even with those acts, Julian Bond had to sue and take his victory in a race for state representative to the SCOTUS in order to get seated in the Georgia lesgislature. That was about 1966. He was one of 11 black legislators elected in 1965 but was denied his seat because he opposed the Viet Nam war. A very thin pretext.
When last I looked it is now 2026, 60 years later. The world is changed. SCOTUS has recognized that and acted. There were never going to be permanent Black seats in Congress. It’s already obvious that you can be black and be president, vice president, senator, representative, governor, state legislator, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and on and on.
You can even be black and be a Republican.
These are not Jacobins in the Democratic Party, but instead are Bolsheviks. How did they gain power. They staged a coup over the Revolutionary Council post-Tsar because they were a minority and repeatedly lost votes. Sounds familiar!
It seems to me that a much maligned Senator raised the very question of Bolsheviks within our nation and government way back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was summarily pushed to oblivion by the very same legacy media, academia, and democrat politicians and talking heads. Isn’t it odd that the very same cabal that silenced him is now attempting to just right out throttle the constitution and take over like any good bunch of Bolsheviks.
GEB, excellent comment!
Turley’s point on the numbers matters. Most Supreme Court decisions are unanimous or close. That does not look like a broken Court. It looks like a system mostly doing its job, even when the hard cases split.
The deeper problem is not primarily on the bench. It is in us. When we blur the line between “bad ruling” and “illegitimate Court,” every disappointment becomes an excuse to turn the judiciary into one more political tool instead of a constitutional check.
I learned from W. Edwards Deming that any functioning system requires agreement on the means of decision making. In a team setting, that often means consensus. You may not like the outcome, but you commit to support it because you trust the process.
A constitutional republic is not built on consensus. It is built on structured disagreement with rules for resolution. But it still depends on that same discipline at the citizen level.
That is why citizen formation sits upstream of all of this. If we do not have a majority of citizens formed for self-government, every institution downstream, courts included, gets pulled into contests of raw power instead of being anchored in principle.
Until we rebuild citizens who can say, “I do not like that outcome, but I accept the process,” the cycle does not break.
It just rotates.
My concern is that having had almost 60+ years of active indoctrination of both students and all those willing to accept the spewings of the media/education industry, we are at a point where taking a similar amount of time to reverse this (even if we could gain quick control of that industry – which we can’t), how do we stop this demographic assembly of progressive tools? I doubt if there is enough time to “evolve” back to our origins. How do we stop, what appears to be – and I use this example as it is quite appropriate in its slow but consuming progress – a Blob that is slowing rolling over out landscape as it did the Blob in the 1958 thriller.
whimsicalmama, I really appreciate your thoughtful comment (concern). Turley’s point on the numbers matters. Most Supreme Court decisions are unanimous or close. That does not look like a broken Court. It looks like a system mostly doing its job, even when the hard cases split.
The deeper problem is not primarily on the bench. It is in us. When we blur the line between “bad ruling” and “illegitimate Court,” every disappointment becomes an excuse to turn the judiciary into one more political tool instead of a constitutional check. Even here, with all the informed debate on this blog, you can see the pattern. Turley posts on a wide range of issues, and the responses follow a familiar rhythm. The debates are informed, passionate, even cathartic. But what are they really accomplishing?
About 15 years ago I hosted a blog on LinkedIn because I was concerned about civics literacy. We did the same thing. We debated issue after issue, solution after solution. Along the way, I kept asking one question: We have many problems with many causes, but is there one root cause? Every time someone offered a problem and a fix, I asked: if we solved that, would the rest go away? The answer was always no. So by definition, it wasn’t the root. After well over a thousand iterations, we finally converged on three things:
– Lack of civic knowledge
– Apathy
– Dependence
At the time, I didn’t have a name for it. Now I do. That’s citizen formation for self-government. Formed citizens don’t just know the Constitution exists. They know how to read it, apply it, and engage others in civil disagreement. They show up locally. They understand their duties, not just their rights.
I learned from W. Edwards Deming that any functioning system requires agreement on the means of decision making. In a team setting, that often means consensus. You may not like the outcome, but you commit to support it because you trust the process. A constitutional republic is not built on consensus. It is built on structured disagreement with rules for resolution. But it still depends on that same discipline at the citizen level. That is why citizen formation sits upstream of all of this. If we do not have a majority of citizens formed for self-government, every institution downstream gets pulled into contests of raw power instead of being anchored in principle.
I hear the concern about time, and it is fair. But it puts the emphasis in the wrong place. If citizen formation is the root issue, then time is secondary to direction. Starting quickly on the wrong path just gets you to the wrong place faster. What matters is starting the clock on the right problem. This country has proven it can move quickly and accomplish big things when it is aligned. The real constraint is not time. It is fragmentation.
Until we rebuild citizens who can say, “I do not like that outcome, but I accept the process,” the cycle does not break. It just rotates.
The Supreme Court is doing exactly what it was intended to do, though they no longer profess to care about precedent or fairness. The three major civil rights acts of the 1960s have all been rendered meaningless, partially by Congress, mostly by SCOTUS. The original court was set up to protect the property and rights of the original voters, white, land-owning, men. Everyone else has had to fight for the same rights with SCOTUS often standing in the way. Voting rights have cost the most in blood and tears and the VRA of 1965 once had teeth. SCOTUS pulled those teeth by requiring proof of intent as opposed to documenting actual discrimination. They have stopped legislation because it was “too close to an election period” when elections were years away and let things go through, they like when elections are around the corner, like this year’s midterms. Louisiana just cancelled an election where early voting was to begin in two days.
I could agree that racial gerrymandering isn’t desirable. It originally existed as a remedy to steps designed to hinder election of Black officials. For the life of me, I can’t understand why partisan gerrymandering is unacceptable. It directly defies the will of the people. The partisan gerrymandering often uses race as a criterion but that’s somehow, okay? I wrote an article about the major civil rights acts and why they’re now worthless,
https://williamspivey.substack.com/p/how-the-major-civil-rights-acts-of
Enigma, you open by saying the Court is doing what it was intended to do, but then fault it for not delivering what you see as fair outcomes. That tension is really the heart of this disagreement. The Court’s job is not to produce outcomes we agree with. It is to interpret the Constitution and apply it to the case in front of it. When that conflicts with what Congress passes or what we think is fair, the Constitution is supposed to control. That is the design.
On the civil rights acts, I would frame it differently than you do. The Court has not made them meaningless. It has enforced constitutional limits on how they can be applied. Those are not the same thing, even if the practical effect feels frustrating. Take the Voting Rights Act. The shift you’re pointing to, from outcomes to intent, comes from how the Constitution is written. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits denial of the vote on account of race. That raises a real question about what standard applies. Reasonable people can disagree on how the Court has handled that, but it is not simply the Court ignoring rights. It is the Court interpreting constitutional boundaries.
On your broader historical point, I think it’s important to separate two things. The Constitution’s principles and the way they were applied in practice have not always lined up. Groups absolutely had to fight to have those principles applied to them. That’s part of the American story. But that is different from saying the Constitution itself was only meant to protect a narrow class.
On gerrymandering, the distinction the Court has drawn between race and politics flows from the text. The Constitution explicitly addresses race in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It does not do the same for partisan line drawing. You can disagree with that outcome, but that’s the line the Court is working from.
All of that said, I think the deeper issue is how we evaluate the Court in the first place. If the standard becomes that the Court is legitimate when it produces outcomes we see as fair, and suspect when it does not, then we have shifted from a system of law to a system of results. At that point, every ruling becomes a proxy fight for power. That is where I think the conversation has to move upstream.
A self-governing system depends on citizens who can say, “I disagree with that ruling,” without immediately concluding, “the system itself is broken.” Without that discipline, every hard case, whether it’s voting rights, redistricting, or precedent, becomes fuel for escalation.
We can argue these cases all day. This blog does that well. But until we deal with that upstream issue, we’re going to keep cycling through the same arguments without resolving the underlying problem.
If partisan gerrymandering wasn’t overwhelmingly race based, you might have a point. There is no inconsistency in me saying that SCOTUS is doing what it was designed to do and not delivering fair outcomes. They existed then and now to protect the interests of the wealthy, and the corporations that are now people. Justices are selected by almost exclusively wealthy Presidents and approved by wealthy Senators. The Constitution is no more than what they say it is and hundreds of years later SCOTUS can invent things like presidential immunity and an individual right to possess weapons unimaginable when the Court was invented. Look at the mayhem that began once Louisiana v. Callais was decided. Our elections produce results further and further from the will of the people. Then again, we have a representative government because the Founders never trusted the people to begin with.
You might be surprised that I once generally agreed with the rationale of Gore v. Bush as the Florida Supreme Court clearly overstepped to reach a desired result. That doesn’t mean SCOTUS didn’t do the same thing or shouldn’t have allowed a full recount in Florida. Still, most people accepted the result because the Court was mostly seen as legitimate. We’ve come a long way since then, with the Court being predictably partisan, while enriching themselves to boot.
Watching all this outrage on the part of the Dems makes me think of fishing. Fishing in the rivers and ponds I did as a kid.. . . hook the fish, then land it up on the bank. What does the fish do? He flops around helplessly, he lays there flopping frantically until he dies. Like the fish that cannot survive out of water, the Dems cannot survive without power, as that is their main source of life. Power over others, power to arrange things to their liking and “no we don’t really care what anyone else thinks”. They call that “democracy”.
The Democrats want more than a packed court. They want a fully autopen-compliant government. For the Presidency, the Dems want another Joe Biden, who was not only autopen-compliant but autopen-ignorant. Harris would be ideal, but Newsom would be acceptable. Their dream team for their “trifecta” would be
a. A Harris Presidency.
b. A Boasberg Court.
c. A Jeffries Congress.
The Dems don’t want just more power, they want arbitrary power – their perfect trifecta.
It’s kind of fun to watch these Dems beat their chest and yell “Look at me” as the next Presidential election looms. The question is who will the DNC choose for their cult members? Don’t even bother having a primary.
Eric Holder’s “Democratic Trifecta in 2028” would be the end of our republic. If you don’t believe this, check out the illegitimate demands, whinings, and illogical helter skelter from the leftists who infest this blog.
Section 2 of the VRA assured Democratic districts in Republican states. That protection for the Democratic Party is now gone, and the Republicans may gain a dozen or more seats, though perhaps not all in time for 2026. That is why the Democrats are angry.
Democrats will try to take control of all 3 branches of the Federal Government by assassinating all of us. It’s in their blood soaked history: e.g. US Civil War, Jim Crow laws, lynching blacks, KKK that morphed into ANTIFA/BLM, killing lives in utero, “assisted suicide” / euthanasia of the elderly, neutering boys / girls who identify as what Ketanji Jackson Brown can’t define, etc.
For all of their thundering about protecting “blacks”, the lily white Legacy Media / Democrats in Virginia, spearheaded by New Jersey born Yankee Abigail Spanberger, used racist election propaganda to paint a black Republican Governor Candidate, Winsome Earle Sears, as an ignorant slave of MAGA. Most recently Spanberger et al. literally disenfranchised black voters in VA with their gerrymandering,
With Justice Elena Kagan, as reported by Mollie Hemingway in her new book on Justice Alito, delaying the Dobbs vote to put more pressure on the Catholic Supreme Court Justices who were being threatened with their lives, and now likely the VRA vote, it appears not even Elena Kagan has any integrity. There is not one Democrat who has a soul.
If voters elect these demons, then they deserve what they have coming to them: pure hell.
Hemingway wrote that Kagan, an Obama appointee, angrily confronted Breyer, a Clinton appointee, in May 2022 behind closed doors after at least one justice, Samuel Alito, had asked his liberal colleagues to speed up writing their dissent because of security threats. Breyer was most likely to agree to Alito’s request, Hemingway wrote.
“Though he had not said he would accommodate the justices whose lives were at risk by getting out a dissent, [Breyer] was the member of the liberal bloc most willing to do so,” Hemingway wrote. “Fiercely liberal in his jurisprudence and in strong disagreement with the majority decision, he nevertheless was a gentleman and a friend to all on the Court. Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking.’”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kagan-screamed-so-loudly-liberal-ally-after-dobbs-leak-wall-shaking-book-claims
I am FINE with the Republicans NEVER returning power to Democrats
Democrats are fighting a CIVIL WAR
And always have been, in trying to overcome the ‘Parchment Promises’ of James Madison, i.e. the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.