Justice Samuel Alito just told the Federalist Society what every American who cares about the Constitution should already fear: a Democrat-controlled Congress can defund the Supreme Court into irrelevance, and the votes now exist to try it.

Speaking at the Antonin Scalia Memorial Dinner Thursday, Alito didn't mince words. "Congress can turn off the lights at the Supreme Court and stop everything from happening if they want to defund their activities," he said, according to the Hill. "And there are many, many, many other things that they can do, or at least try to do." His warning was plain: "If the independence of the judiciary is eliminated, then the Constitution as adopted in 1789 will no longer be the same."

This isn't alarmism. The midterm sweep gave Democrats the House and Senate, and the party's progressive flank has been publicly circling the court for months. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested Democrats were willing to impeach justices who she claimed "legalized" President Trump's alleged criminality, as Breitbart reported. Rep. Pramila Jayapal has pushed expanding the court and imposing term limits, arguing the current majority is "incapable" of interpreting the law fairly. "We need to expand the court. We need term limits, and we need an ethics and transparency standard," she said in June.

The playbook is clear: when you can't win at the ballot box on the issues, weaponize Congress's purse strings to break the branch of government standing in your way. The Constitution shields justices from salary cuts, but Congress controls funding for staff, operations, and facilities. In 2023, Democratic senators already tried withholding $10 million until the court adopted stricter ethics rules, the New York Post reported. The court subsequently issued its first formal code of conduct — though critics called it toothless. The extortion worked once; expect more.

Rep. Laurel Lee, Republican of Florida, called it straight in September: "The Democrats' words there are a clear effort to attack the legitimacy of the court and to change it in an effort to achieve their preferred policy outcomes. That runs against everything in this country related to the separation of powers and protecting the independence of the court." She noted even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said nine is a good number.

Breitbart framed Alito's remarks squarely as a warning about the post-midterm power shift; the New York Post buried the election context, noting only that Alito "did not directly reference the midterm results." That omission matters. Without the new Democratic majority, these threats are just talk. With it, they're a legislative agenda.

Alito also took aim at lower-court judges who have blocked presidential actions, saying some have "gone far astray in abuse of their powers." He compared their overreach to weapons: "If you think about a hand grenade, a 500-pound bomb and a nuclear weapon, the hand grenade is the least dangerous. But that is not to say that it is not dangerous."

The founders designed three coequal branches to keep any one from devouring the others. When the legislative branch can starve the judicial branch into submission, there is nothing equal about it. The question now is whether anyone in Washington still cares enough to stop it.