If Leftists Pack the Court, They Destroy the Republic

[W]hile FDR's initial Court-packing proposal – which was presented in an uncharacteristically ham-handed manner – failed, the constitutional crisis that compelled it quickly faded as Justice Owen Roberts started voting with the Court's liberals to uphold New Deal programs.  Soon after, retirements allowed FDR to make enough nominees to ensure a Court that would not interfere with the core New Deal agenda.

Here's what the opposition to Kavanaugh was really about: the Democrats lost over 1,000 state and national seats to Republicans under President Obama's two terms, with 900 of those on the state level.  State losses are particularly detrimental to Democrats because national candidates often come from state legislatures....

So what have the Democrats always heavily relied on to impose their politics upon people who will not voluntarily vote to implement those policies?  The courts, at all levels, with activist judges who legislate from their benches.

With Kavanaugh's confirmation, the Democrats know that the Supreme Court is likely lost for generations.  Exacerbating this problem for the Democrats is President Trump's and the GOP-majority Senate's record-breaking pace of confirming federal judges: thus far, 26 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals and 41 judges to the United States District Courts, with another 10 nominees pending confirmation to the Court of Appeals and 60 to the District Courts. 

Let's review: the majority of Americans in the majority of states don't want the Democrats' politics, and their method for imposing politics upon people who don't want them (the courts and judicial activists) are getting reformed to the kinds of courts our Founders envisioned: originalist courts that interpret law rather than make law....

... As Tucker Carlson has pointed out, “Republicans could pack the Supreme Court right now if they wanted to. They have the power. But they won't do that. Only the left is embracing extremism right now.” That is because progressives view the Constitution as an inconvenient obstacle written by old white men that needs to be discarded. Their “fix" is to simply do away with the Founding Fathers’ constitutional principle of separation of powers once the left takes over the legislative and executive branches by hook or by crook. They will then use their collective power over those branches to effectively force the third branch of government, the judiciary, into bending to their collectivist ideology.

Progressives’ “ends justify the means” philosophy is nothing new. President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to expand the number of justices in 1937 after the Supreme Court had struck down several of his New Deal initiatives. While claiming that he wanted to produce “a constant flow of new and younger blood into the judiciary,” his court-packing scheme was designed to direct that flow of new justices towards backing his progressive agenda. For expedient reasons, FDR chose to end-run the constitutional amendment process. He chose instead direct action against a co-equal branch of the federal government that, in his words, would “save the Constitution from the Court.” This oxymoron flies in the face of the fundamental role of judicial review, established in the very early days of our republic in the case of Marbury v. Madison, to determine the constitutionality of legislation and executive actions....

Video: Senator Ben Sasse rips into how government functions, C-SPAN3, September 4, 2018. Senator Ben Sasse rips into how we distorted the theory on our government should function. An insightful 13 minute speech focusing on how Congress has abrogated their responsibility, resulting in the politicization of the Supreme Court.

... This new conservatism must end the same way as Buckley conservatism ended. That is, as an amen chorus for the Progressive state. If you agree that the new definition of a nation is post-national, as in not being defined by borders, language and people, then the debate is what defines the new state. If you further agree that the new state is defined by ideas and a set of values, then the only thing left is to figure out who defines those ideas and how will they be enforced. Eventually, an agreement is reached.

This notion of the state as a post-national, post-Christian theocracy is not without real consequences. It may seem ridiculous, but when the people in charge believe in something, no matter how absurd, the people pay the price. You see that in the Kavanaugh fight. Big shot intellectuals are starting to notice what people on this side of the great divide have been saying for years. If society is defined by “who we are” then someone who dissents must be excluded from that society, by force, if necessary....

... Any Republican who voted against Kavanaugh (and, of course, any Democrat who voted for him) would thereby exit his party. Just as the congressional vote in 1846 on the so-called Wilmot Proviso revealed that the fault-line in American politics was about slavery, not party, the Kavanaugh nomination shows what American politics is, at heart, about. It is about “rights” and the entire system that arose in our lifetimes to confer them not through legislation but through court decisions: Roe v. Wade in 1973 (abortion), Regents v. Bakke in 1979 (affirmative action), Plyler v. Doe in 1982 (immigrant rights), and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (gay marriage). The Democrats are the party of rights. As such, they are the party of the Supreme Court. You can see why Ted Kennedy claimed in a 1987 diatribe that the Yale law professor Robert Bork would turn the United States into a police state. For Democrats, an unfriendly Supreme Court is a threat to everything.

That means the country itself. The general Democratic view that has hardened since the 1960s is the one expressed on many occasions by Barack Obama. The United States is not a country bound by a common history or a common ethnicity—it is a set of values. That is an open, welcoming thing to build a country around. But it has a dark side, and we have seen the dark side during the hearings. If a country is only a set of values, then the person who does not share what elites “know” to be the country’s values is not really a member of the national community and is not deserving of its basic protections, nice guy though he might otherwise be. Such people “belong” to the country in the way some think illegal immigrants do—provisionally. ...