Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) struck a nerve on the Left when he recalled the battle after the passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. As leader of a relatively new Senate GOP majority, he quickly and clearly signaled that Scalia’s seat would be filled by the next President rather than outgoing President Barack Obama. Reflecting on that time during Monday’s radio show of conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt, McConnell called it “the single most consequential thing” he did as majority leader.

Hewitt seemed to agree. “Had you not done so, it’s my view that President Trump would not have been elected, and we wouldn’t have Justice Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett,” he said.

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While Hewitt was pleased, leaders on the Left predictably were not. The New York Times referred to McConnell’s “stonewalling” of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland (now U.S. Attorney General), for the Scalia seat. And to be fair, “stonewalling” — while arguably negative in connotation — is not inaccurate. The problem comes when the Left refers to the “steal” or worse.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told The Hill, “Mitch McConnell is already foreshadowing that he’ll steal a 3rd Supreme Court seat if he gets the chance.”

In the same article, Aaron Belkin of Take Back the Court similarly said, “Steal one seat, shame on you. Steal a second seat, shame on us.”

Even liberal columnist Ruth Marcus warned in The Washington Post of “the wiles of McConnell” and said, “Anyone who watched McConnell steal a Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama and Merrick Garland knew he would happily do it all over again.”

These voices conveniently forget (or perhaps they refuse to see) that Leader McConnell didn’t break any rule in 2016. They often contend that President Obama had the right and duty to nominate a replacement for Scalia (which is true), but they miss that voters installed Republicans as a majority in the Senate in 2015 apparently to be a check on the second-term Obama administration. McConnell had a right to his position, too, and, as he told Hewitt, “in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled.”

Now having a right to a position doesn’t mean the overall situation is healthy for the nation. But it is today’s state of play. And it is the result of decades of judicial confirmation wars in which the Left is at least as guilty of a degrading landscape as the Right. In fact, the Left’s emphasis on securing ideological wins through the judiciary helped lay the groundwork for this fight.

That is why today progressives — including a number who want to pack the high court by expanding it — are unleashing new volleys in a pressure campaign to get liberal Justice Stephen Breyer to retire. They want to ensure a new nominee can be pushed through the Senate before voters potentially return Republicans to a majority to check the Biden administration. They fear a Garland re-do. And, in their eyes even worse, they worry about a rerun of what happened when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declined to retire under Obama and then passed away during the Trump administration and the term of a GOP-led Senate. Those two situations led directly to the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

For progressives like Brian Fallon of Demand Justice, this situation has epic implications for America. “If Republicans regain control of the Senate before Breyer’s replacement is confirmed, the court’s legitimacy and our democracy will be at even greater risk,” he told the New York Times.

But that comment and others like it shine light on the real problem. The “risk” for our nation is Breyer? No, this particular risk is actually an unhealthy reliance on the high court.

Judges are not meant to be super-legislators. They have a high calling to decipher correct application of our web of laws and to determine right courses in specific cases. And they can call a foul when policymakers take actions outside the guardrails of the U.S. Constitution. But judges don’t make the law, Well, they’re not supposed to.

Justice Breyer himself told a group at Harvard Law School in April, “If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a check on other branches.”

We need judges who are faithful to the true nature of their much-needed positions and the trust the public places in them. Quite frankly, we also need legislators and executives who understand the responsibilities and limitations of their own positions as well. Let’s pray that America returns to a healthy understanding of the roles of our government’s three branches and the right place of checks and balances between them.

HOW WILL YOU PRAY FOR CHECKS AND BALANCES IN OUR NATION?

(Aaron Mercer is a Contributing Writer with two decades of experience in Washington, D.C.’s public policy arena. (Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)