I have long been a student of the United States Supreme Court. For nigh five decades I have followed court rulings, Supreme Court Justices and the effect rulings have had on politics and the citizenry. I've been most interested in the Supreme Court because I believe it is the branch of government that has the most prevailing and significant impact on the everyday lives of the American people. Of course, it also serves a monumental role as an arbiter who maintains the checks and balances on the other branches of government. The U.S. has an extensive hierarchical court system allowing for appeals and reviews. Cases in the lower courts are often overturned, dismissed, retried, and appealed all in attempt to ensure true justice is carried out. Cases that are unable to get resolved in the lower courts often are presented to the Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort.
Former Justice Anthony Kennedy was appointed by President Reagan in 1987. After serving 31 years on the bench he retired in 2018. Justice Kennedy was known for writing some of the court's landmark opinions and wielded significant influence across various legal domains, including LGBTQ+ rights. To give some insight into Justice Kennedy's personal composition, in the case of Griswold vs Connecticut, a privacy case about the use of contraceptives, Kennedy discussed "a zone of liberty, a zone of protection, a line that's drawn where the individual can tell the Government, 'beyond this line you may not go.'" Kennedy became known as an independent thinker, though he voted with the conservative justices the majority of the time, but not always.
Recently, Kennedy spoke during "Speak Up for Justice"' a virtual forum about threats to the rule of law, defending the role of judges in a democracy. He advocated the need to protect them and their families from threats. "Many in the rest of the world look to the United States to see what democracy is, to see what democracy ought to be," stated Kennedy. "If they see a hostile, fractious discourse that uses identity politics rather than to talk about issues, democracy is at risk. Freedom is at risk." Kennedy did not mention Trump by name during his speech. He did say, "We should be concerned in this country about, as I've already indicated, the tone of our political discourse. Identity politics are used so that a person is characterized by his or her partisan affiliation. That is not what democracy and civil discourse is about."
Other participants at the forum, which included judges from the US and other countries warned about how attacks on courts can threaten democracies, denouncing statements by Trump deriding the courts. US District court Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed by a disgruntled lawyer who went to her New Jersey home in 2020, said, "disinformation about judges was spreading 'from the top down' with jurists attacked as 'rogue and corrupt'". Salas warned that the number of threats recorded against judges this year was reaching unprecedented heights in the U.S., noting that the U.S. Marshals Service has tracked more than 400 threats since January, when Trump took office.
Though retired, and no longer a sitting jurist, Justice Kennedy's resounding opinion on this issue should strike a strident chord with everyone, from the President himself down to ordinary people discussing politics in a coffee shop. There is indeed a threat to democracy, finally someone has spoken up and told us exactly what it is.
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