What is more alarming than the prospect of ignorance on the part of the majority is their collective seduction by hard left elites, particularly those in the Academy. Supreme Court justices don’t get out much. When they do it is typically to the nation’s law schools and to judicial and ABA conferences, where they are no doubt surrounded by thousands of elites who have as much experience with the war as the justices, but are perhaps even less well read on the nature of the jihadists’ ideology and tactics. Andrew McCarthy’s brilliant new book, Willful Blindness, A Memoir of the Jihad, recounts how unprepared the American legal system was for the assault by the fanatics when it first crashed into the World trade center in 1993 and how even after 9/11 it could not adjust to cope with the war in which we are engulfed. Obviously the highest rank of our legal elite have not yet come to grip with the nature of the enemy.
We have to pray that Justice Scalia is wrong though common sense tells us he is right. The majority’s indulgence of the killers’ demand to be treated as ordinary Americans or as aliens journeying through our land is as astonishing as it is dangerous. By asserting its preeminence over the combination of the president and the Congress, Justice Kennedy and his colleagues have certainly proven they are not at the top of the least dangerous branch. Far from it, in fact. The dangers the majority subject us to are all too apparent.