Despite her habit of cackling at inappropriate moments and launching into baffling servings of word salad when posed with hard questions, Vice President Kamala Harris agreed to sit down with Chuck Todd for an episode of Meet the Press that is scheduled to air tomorrow. NBC News offered a preview of the interview this weekend where the subject of the Supreme Court came up. For the umpteenth time, Harris blasted the conservative members of the court as being “activists” instead of jurists because of the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, declaring that we are now “suffering as a nation” because of it. Of course, what she was really doing was further undermining the legitimacy of the court as a coequal branch of the government and likely inspiring additional “activism” that will endanger the justices.

Vice President Kamala Harris denounced the current Supreme Court as “an activist” body in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade.

“I think this is an activist court,” Harris told NBC News’ Chuck Todd, moderator of Meet the Press, when asked about polling that shows the nation’s confidence in the court hitting a low.

“We had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body as an extension of what we have decided to be, the privacy rights to which all people are entitled. And this court took that constitutional right away, and we are suffering as a nation because of it.”

As far as I’m concerned, this should be sounding all sorts of alarm bells no matter where you stand on the issue of abortion because it could just as easily apply to any other contentious legal matter of the day. The Founders created three branches of our government for a reason. The people elect the legislatures who create our laws. The executive branch is charged with enforcing those laws. (Don’t get me started as to how well that’s working out these days.) And when those laws are challenged by the citizens, the judicial branch is required to act as the umpire and determine if the laws meet constitutional muster.

That’s how things were supposed to operate from the very beginning, and for a long time, the system operated fairly well. We can all sigh and look back at the times the Supreme Court delivered some serious clunkers (Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Kelo), but they at least kept the American cart moving forward while staying between the guardrails. The plaintiffs would fight their best fight and if they failed to prevail, they would go back to the drawing board and try a different approach.

Today, however, we have not only a partisan media machine talking about the “damage to democracy” caused by court decisions that don’t go their way, but some of our highest elected officials doing so as well. And since we live in an era where riots pass for “protests” as long as they are supporting the established narrative, the welcome mat has been rolled out for violence as an answer to political disputes. We already had one person show up with plans to assassinate one of the Associate Justices. How many more such instances are required before we admit that the wheels could still come off of this cart entirely?

Citizens are free to disagree with any specific laws, executive mandates or court decisions as they see fit. But you would imagine that our highest officials in any of the three branches of government would at least support the validity of the process (if not the specific outcome), wouldn’t you? You can’t hide behind the unassailable powers of your own branch if you undercut the other two. If we continue to invalidate the authority of the government from within, we will simply be generating even more unrest and potentially violent, destructive responses.

This needs to stop. And if Kamala Harris can’t at least respect the process, she’s the wrong person to send out to carry this message.