In defaming the U.S. Supreme Court – in front of an overseas audience – for its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Joe Biden didn’t just throw conservative Supreme Court justices under the bus. He also trashed America’s ingenious system of self-government.

It’s an utterly disgraceful thing for a U.S. president to do.

Lament the ruling. Disagree firmly but politely with the justices. Promise to find a legislative way around it. But don’t trash your own government on foreign soil, as Biden did at the NATO summit in Madrid this past week.

In answering a reporter’s leading question about whether the nation is going “backward” – in large part due to the high court’s sending the question of abortion down to the states and to the American people where it belongs – Biden defended the country’s status in the world. He claimed, all evidence to the contrary, that America is “better positioned to lead the world than we ever have been,” citing crippling-high inflation rates that, we’re supposed to be comforted, are lower than “other nations in the world.” Of course, he didn’t say which nations, or how many, or that there are also many with lower inflation than the U.S.

But then he launched into a shameful smear of his country’s highest court on the world stage.

“The one thing that has been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States – overruling not only Roe v. Wade but essentially challenging the right to privacy. … I can understand why the American people are frustrated because of what the Supreme Court did.”

Let’s unpack that reckless, defamatory statement.

First and foremost, Biden’s overseas attack on the court is completely unfair and will damage the country’s and the judiciary’s reputation globally for some time to come.

In contrast to what Biden bizarrely called its “outrageous behavior,” the court majority’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was exceedingly well-reasoned and supported by argument. The decision certainly shakes things up in an already topsy-turvy republic. But “destabilizing”? That’s a word normally reserved for things that threaten a government’s stability.

In truth, the American government worked precisely as designed in this case. The court evaluated and issued a ruling on a dispute, based upon the law and the Constitution, not a particular desired outcome that might appease the volatile Left.

In addition, and something foreign audiences may not understand, the judiciary is a branch of government that is “co-equal” to the executive and legislative branches. They do not exist, nor do they toil, by the leave of a sovereign.

Biden, who was sold to voters in 2020 as being much more moderate than the Democratic Party’s far-left puppet masters, nonetheless echoes their hysteria over Roe. The radical and civics-challenged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brayed that the high court had “dramatically overreached its authority” – oddly enough by ruling that it doesn’t even have the authority to legalize abortion by judicial fiat. The Supreme Court’s majority actually reduced the courts’ authority in the Dobbs ruling.

How many governments or branches of government around the world ever voluntarily cede power to the people like that? The president might have shared that little bit of redemption with the world’s media, but chose not to.

Moreover, Biden carries on as if his overwrought opposition to the ruling was unanimous among the American people. Wasn’t candidate Biden going to represent all Americans? A mighty swath of the citizens, Mr. President, is absolutely delighted with the ruling. But the Great Unifier failed to give them a shout-out in Madrid. It’s a good bet the even further-left Barack Obama would’ve been more diplomatic and inclusive on the world stage.

“You have the actual president of the United States on foreign soil trashing the third branch of government,” Washington Times opinion editor Charlie Hurt noted on Fox News, “at a time when that third branch of government is under unprecedented attack, whether it’s justices being picketed at their homes, their children at their schools or a confessed assassination attempt. It’s appalling.”

Even as Biden was taking a torch to the high court, and by extension the American system of government with its beautiful separation of powers, the Supreme Court gave him a big win – deciding he could terminate the Trump-era remain-in-Mexico policy in which asylum-seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their applications played out in court.

In a republic such as ours, you win some and you lose some. But the Left and its current standard-bearer Biden apply a flamethrower to any outcome and any institution they don’t control – despite the fact that they control both chambers in Congress, the executive branch, most of the news and entertainment media, the vast majority of academia and on and on.

Yet, when you disagree with the Left, even if you’re a co-equal leader in the federal government, you’re guilty of “outrageous behavior.”

The Left chronically drones on that all others are a “threat to democracy.”

You’ve just read about the true threat to it.