Justices Are Not Kings

A few short weeks ago, speaking at a Federalist Society event, Justice Clarence Thomas warned ominously that “you cannot have a free society” without stable institutions. He contended that “we should be careful destroying our institutions because they don’t give us what we want when we want.” In hindsight his prediction that public regard for institutions—his worry that he didn’t know how much longer we would have and keep those institutions—reads more like a ransom note than a lament.

What Thomas was telling us was that institutional respect is owed, blindly...