Indeed, so popular did this approach become among abortion-rights activists that assailing the Supreme Court became the major focus of NOW, which as a result nearly doubled its membership and recruited record numbers of women to run for public office. In a June 1990 column criticizing the Supreme Court for upholding parental-notification requirements in the case of abortions by minors, Yard declared the court to be “cynical, callous and monumentally insensitive,” noting that the “court’s ruling will cost teens’ lives.”

In recent years, criticism of the Supreme Court by left-wing organizations like NOW has been no less intense than that of the Right, which has led the charge for the past thirty years. The appointment of conservative justices by Presidents Reagan and Bush, coupled with a shift among public-policy experts against some of the liberal prescriptions of the 1970s and 1980s, has led the court to slay a number of sacred cows of the Left, especially racial preferences and sweeping protections for the rights of criminal suspects.

In 1989, the court issued several decisions that increased the burden of proof on plaintiffs in racial discrimination cases, making it more difficult for blacks and other minority groups to demonstrate that they had been wronged. These decisions sparked protests by civil-rights activists. Addressing a rally of 10,000 protesters held at the Supreme Court itself, Benjamin Hooks, then Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), declared that the court’s rulings on civil-rights legislation were the “legal lynching of black America’s hope... to become full partners in the American dream.” At the NAACP convention that year, Hooks called for “civil disobedience on a mass scale that has never been seen before,” in response to a “Supreme Court … hell-bent on destroying the few gains minorities and women have made in this century. We’ve got a bunch of plunderers who subvert the Constitution.”(St. Louis Post Dispatch, July 10, 1989)

Similar eruptions took place in 1995 and 1996, when the Supreme Court invalidated a number of predominately black voting districts that had been created under the Voting Rights Act to ensure that representatives of minority groups would reach high elected office. Rejecting specially constructed majority black and Hispanic districts in Texas and North Carolina, the court ruled that gerrymandering for partisan political purposes was acceptable, but that race could not be the predominant factor in shaping congressional districts. Expect “a return to the days of all-white government,” warned Laughlin McDonald, the top civil-rights litigator for the ACLU. “The noose is tightening,” said Elaine Jones, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Jesse Jackson suggested that the 1996 decision would bring about “ethnic cleansing.”(The American Lawyer, December 2, 1996)

Again, there were no judicial assassination attempts, no collapse of the rule of law. No one tried to prevent the demonstrations, to seek police investigations for incitement. The debate was allowed to rage, and a fundamental respect for the institutions of government was maintained. If anything, that respect was strengthened: When citizens are allowed to voice their anger, frustration or concern over the process of government, when their positions are fundamentally legitimized by the right to protest—even in the crudest of terms—they feel respected by the law, and in turn maintain a higher respect for the rule of law.

 

Israelis are terrified by the thought of what might happen if hundreds of thousands of Haredim are allowed to march on the Supreme Court, and if religious leaders are permitted to calumny court rulings. The American experience shows that nothing need happen, so long as the outer bounds of legitimate protest are clearly delineated (a healthy police presence to buttress those bounds can’t hurt). We may not appreciate the tone these dissenters employ, or the arguments they put forward. In a democracy, however, the benefit of the doubt should be given to free speech, and only when there is overwhelming evidence that it poses a clear and present danger should it be restrained.

Out of fear, defenders of Israel’s Supreme Court have sought every means at their disposal to prevent the Haredim from voicing their opinions. Perhaps if critics of the courts were granted the public legitimacy enjoyed by their counterparts in America, they would not have as much to protest.