They helped undermine our institutions — do they see the consequences yet?
Certain members of media are apparently only now discovering the cost of undermining the institutions that protect civil society from unrest and collapse.
Better late than never.
MS NOW host Stephanie Ruhle and longtime CNN correspondent Dana Bash wondered recently whether the institutions that adjudicate electoral matters will “hold” if the November midterms produce a crisis.
“When we in the news are covering these elections,” said Ruhle, “when we say we could be on the verge of a potential constitutional crisis, lots of people blow it off. They’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s crazy. Our institutions always hold. This is the United States of America.’ Are you that confident?”
Responded Bash, “I’m hopeful. I’ll use that word. And that is because so far, the institutions have held. But we have seen them bending almost to the point where they break.”
She added, “So, it is something that I cover — I know you cover on a daily basis — watching for signs that the system might not hold or that the system might be challenged by the most important person in this country as people go to the polls. And the fact that we are all hyper aware and vigilant of it is half the battle, I do think. … And so I’m going to go back to hopeful. I don’t — I’m not going to say confident. I just want to stick with hopeful.”
The two then laughed.
Surely, they understand that institutions built to resolve constitutional crises are only as strong as the trust people place in them.
If they understand this, then they might consider the damage their own industry has done by attempting to destroy the legitimacy of those institutions — above all the Supreme Court — simply because some of its decisions do not align fully with Democratic policy preferences.
The attacks on the court, from CNN, MS NOW, and elsewhere, are especially egregious. They are also especially relevant here. When we talk about institutions designed to guide us through constitutional crises, the Supreme Court is obviously at the top of the list. But in the popular press, the court is treated as illegitimate, described as severely right-wing and in the pocket of Republicans and their donors.
A cursory review of the court’s actual record shows it is none of these things. Since Trump’s reelection, he has won three merits decisions on executive authority and lost two. On the emergency docket, there have been 43 applications thus far (four withdrawn and one pending), 41 of which were filed by the administration, according to Ballotpedia. Of the decided applications, about two-thirds favor the White House. A closer look, however, shows the court less often expanding executive power than reining in lower-court judges who had badly overstepped their authority.
The court might be best described as a “mixed bag.” It has not sided with activist judges, but neither has it rubber-stamped Trump’s executive overreaches or upheld his most treasured initiatives.
The facts, however, have not prevented the media from waging a counterprogramming and subversion campaign against the court’s legitimacy, simply because it has a conservative majority.
At CNN, supposedly the more serious network, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin referred to the Supreme Court as Republican Sen. Mitch “McConnell’s Supreme Court.” Chief Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic — doing the “people say” routine of stating her opinion without stating her opinion — worried that the public sees the majority as “very politically motivated” and accused it of “plowing through all sorts of norms, rolling back a half century of abortion rights and also changing gun rights, changing regulatory authority. Doing all these things based on patterns that arise from their private partisan roots.” Chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid alleged that the “conservative supermajority” holds “an increasingly expansive view of executive power.”
Journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria also warned that the court “has been growing more ideologically predictable — that is, politically partisan – in recent years,” and that judges “appointed by Republicans now almost always rule in ways that Republicans want them to.”
It bears repeating that this is the exact opposite of the truth. No liberal justice crossed over to join the conservative majority in any of the executive-authority merits cases the Trump administration won in its second term. And when the White House lost, it was always because conservative justices joined their liberal colleagues in decisions that were 5-4, 6-3, and even 7-2.
This follows a long tradition, which continues through to this day, of Republican-appointed justices being less ideologically rigid, crossing over to vote with their liberal counterparts, even though the liberals almost never do this.
At MS NOW, a network created for histrionic liberals, the coverage is only slightly more deranged: The court is “illegitimate,” “rogue,” and “captured.” It comprises “six right wing politicians in robes,” “a kind of unaccountable super-legislature.” The “court itself is rigged,” composed of “partisan hacks.” It is a “partisan institution full of hacks that will do everything in their power to protect Donald Trump.” And so on, and so forth.
A campaign by major media, including the New York Times and ProPublica, tried to make audiences care which flags Justice Sam Alito’s wife flies outside their vacation home. So determined were they to cast aspersions on the justice that they demonized a beloved flag of the American Revolutionary era in the process — a flag that liberals and conservatives alike had flown up to that point for decades without any partisan connotation.
Almost nothing said or insinuated by any of these media figures about the justices or the court is true, yet the attacks continue anyway. No mind is ever given to the long-term damage that their slanders cause to the institutions that will be counted on to hold our country together in any dispute over our laws and elections.
It’s a fairly simple lesson, yet one apparently lost on single-minded news organizations run by wannabe resistance fighters.
Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.
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