Democrats threatened to “expand” the Supreme Court — by which they mean to keep adding new members until they have a majority that they are confident will rule their way, Constitution be damned — earlier this year in response to the Dobbs leak, and, now, in their push to gut Americans’ civil rights as though the Second Amendment did not exist, they are doing so again. The gun-rights movement has been remarkably (though not perfectly) peaceful as progressives have worked to strip gun-owners of their constitutional rights — something that is really quite notable, given how well-armed this demographic is. (It is almost as though legal gun-ownership is not the relevant variable when it comes to criminal violence!) If Democrats do what figures such as Representative Mondaire Jones (D., N.Y.) suggest, they will be very much a mirror image of the January 6 insurrectionists in their belief that any democratic or legal process that does not give them the outcome they want is ipso facto illegitimate. This is dishonest, craven, imbecilic — and dangerous.

Abortion opponents followed procedure and trusted in the democratic and constitutional processes for 50 years, and Second Amendment defenders have done the same, winning a key victory (though not a dispositive one) in the 2008 Heller decision. And now Democrats, who apparently never considered the possibility that they could lose at the Supreme Court, threaten to upend the entire constitutional order in a fit of pique, partisanship, and corruption. They already have corrupted the nomination process, beginning with Robert Bork and the smearing of Clarence Thomas, and then escalating into the fusillade of salacious — and entirely fictitious — allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Now, because even all this has failed to give them what they want, they threaten the Supreme Court itself.