Imagine if the United States were a one-party country, a Democrat country. Imagine a Democrat administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress.

Now imagine a Democrat-controlled Supreme Court — a Supreme Court that ruled in rapid succession that, for example, anchor babies deserve birthright citizenship, that illegal immigrants can’t be deported, that the Electoral College could be eliminated, that DC and Puerto Rico merited statehood, that racial discrimination in hiring and in college admissions is legal, and that abortion on demand is the settled law of the land.

To finish up this grim thought experiment, work hard with me to imagine an idealistic young clerk of Justice Samuel Alito leaking a pending Supreme Court decision to uphold Roe v. Wade as settled law. And imagine legions of conservative Americans, deeply incensed by that unconstitutional ruling, doxing the liberal Supreme Court justices and violently taking to the streets, protesting threateningly in front of the suburban DC homes of Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. And imagine thuggish pro-lifers vandalizing and even setting ablaze Planned Parenthood centers all across the country.

And, finally, imagine one deranged young pro-life zealot heading to, say, Justice Kagan’s home late one night with a suitcase and backpack containing a tactical knife, a Glock 17 with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a screwdriver, a nail punch, a crow bar, a pistol light, some duct tape, and hiking boots with padding on the soles.

None of these things, of course, is legitimately imaginable because we on the Right don’t behave that way. But that leftist Supreme Court was a whisker away in 2016, when the decisive swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin went for Donald Trump by a combined 78,000 votes — or one vote of every 200 cast across those three states.

Think about it: Had Hillary Clinton won the election, the seats held by Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett would instead be held by ardent leftists — think Merrick Garland but decades younger — and the Supreme Court would’ve been lost to the Left, lost to the “living” constitutionalists, for a generation or more.

Setting aside the utter unlikelihood of a conservative Supreme Court clerk ever behaving as did that leaking leftist clerk, imagine how quickly a Democrat-controlled high court and a Democrat-controlled Department of Justice would’ve found and prosecuted such a rogue and reckless clerk.

And imagine how quickly Clinton’s FBI would’ve tracked down and arrested those pro-life protesters and arsonists and insurrectionists, and how quickly and viciously her DOJ would’ve prosecuted them.

Everyone remembers that glorious and long-overdue Dobbs decision. And everyone remembers that infamous and incomprehensibly unsolved leak. And everyone remembers how Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden Justice Department refused to enforce federal law by arresting the leftist thugs who protested in front of the houses of the conservative justices.

But what hasn’t been reported is how the Supreme Court’s three pro-abortion justices — Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — slow-walked their dissenting opinion in order to hold up the release of the Dobbs decision and thereby give their foot soldiers time to generate outrage and organize protests and terrorize the five majority justices.

As Mollie Hemingway writes in her forthcoming book about Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the majority opinion in Dobbs, “As the protests continued, the Alitos were moved to a secure location. Justice Barrett had to put on a bulletproof vest in front of her children, most of whom still lived at home.”

This is just sick stuff.

As Justice Alito wrote in his Dobbs decision, “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly.” And that’s as it should be.

Alito’s draft opinion, though, was published in Politico on May 2, 2022. But the Dobbs decision didn’t come down until late the following month, on June 24. That means that Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor dragged their feet for nearly two months with reckless disregard for the safety of their Supreme Court colleagues.

It got to the point where Kagan “angrily confronted Breyer” because “Breyer was most likely to agree to Alito’s request” to finish up their dissent, Hemingway wrote. Apparently, Kagan screamed at Breyer so loudly that the “wall was shaking.”

In addition, as Hemingway tells it, Chief Justice John Roberts was working behind the scenes with the senior liberal Justice, Stephen Breyer, to flip one of the five conservative justices to their side, to the liberal side, in order to undo the looming Dobbs decision. With “conservative” friends like Roberts, who needs a proctologist?

Meanwhile, those conservative justices endured some very unsettling, very frightening days. “Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices,” Hemingway writes. “Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically.”

As for the very real threat of assassination that was looming over these justices, if you think it was overblown, think again. The Left has tried repeatedly to assassinate Donald Trump. And it succeeded in assassinating Charlie Kirk.

So what’s a Supreme Court justice or two among True Believers and leftist psychos?