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During an interview on MS NOW, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., was asked whether he trusted the courts to stand up to President Donald Trump in the legal fight over the White House ballroom. Schiff said he trusted the lower courts. The Supreme Court? Apparently that is another matter.Schiff said Trump is counting on “the people he put on the Supreme Court to do his bidding,” adding that “most of the time they’re willing to do it.” Then he went further, claiming the exceptions come when rulings might affect “the moneyed interest behind these Supreme Court justices and their appointments.”That is a lot to casually throw into one little television answer.Schiff is not simply saying he disagrees with the Court. He is suggesting Supreme Court justices are effectively political servants of Trump, except when the financial interests supposedly behind them demand something different.That is an extraordinary allegation, and Schiff offered no evidence for it as usual.There is another inconvenient problem. The record does not fit his story.Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were all confirmed by the United States Senate. And they do not vote as some Trump-controlled bloc.In February, Gorsuch and Barrett joined the judgment rejecting Trump’s use of IEEPA to impose sweeping tariffs, while Kavanaugh dissented. In June, Kavanaugh joined the majority rejecting Trump’s attempt to immediately remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, while Barrett and Gorsuch dissented.Some puppet show.There is a legitimate constitutional dispute over the ballroom. The D.C. Circuit ruled that major above-ground construction cannot proceed without congressional authorization, and the administration went to the Supreme Court Friday seeking relief. Fine. Argue the law. Argue congressional authority. Argue spending.But Schiff jumped from that legal dispute to implying corruption at the Supreme Court.Then came the ominous promise of a future “reckoning” and “accounting.”For what exactly? For Supreme Court justices deciding cases he does not like?The White House says a permanent ballroom is needed because major state functions currently require temporary structures, and presidents of both parties have modified White House grounds. Barack Obama even had the tennis court resurfaced to accommodate basketball in 2009. Somehow I suspect that if a Democratic president had proposed a permanent state-event facility, we would hear considerably fewer references to “golden lies.”Disagree with the Court all you want. That is democracy.But declaring the Court corrupt whenever you fear it might rule against you is not defending institutions. It is undermining them before the decision even comes down.