Joe Biden and the Dems’ Supreme Court “Reform” The war on our Constitution and Bill of Rights. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/joe-biden-and-the-dems-supreme-court-reform/
Joe Biden may be a “political corpse,” but he has six months to get off a Parthian shot or two. He’s already taking aim at the Supreme Court––one of our most important branches of government for protecting citizens and their unalienable rights from the lust for power of the rest of the federal government and their encroaching tyrannical ambitions.
Biden launched this attack––endorsed by the Democrat Party and its probable presidential candidate Kamala Harris––in a column for the Washington Post, where he claimed, “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.” Having ginned up a “crisis” that can’t be let to go to waste, Biden is calling the assault a “reform” comprising 18-year term limits for justices; and government oversight, external to the Court itself, to investigate and punish dubious charges of “corruption.”
The Wall Street Journal stated the obvious: “This is an invitation for partisans to besiege the Court with complaints, however trivial.” For example, the judge on Trump’s trial for allegedly mishandling classified documents has received “more than 1,000 complaints in a week as part of what it called an ‘orchestrated campaign.’” Biden’s offensive against the court is not about some “crisis of ethics” and holding “corrupt” justices to account, but making it easier to discredit and recuse conservative justices and originalists who believe that the Constitution means what it says. These so-called “reforms” are political weaponss for illegal meddling in the Court’s decision-making in order to protect progressive policies and culture-war preferences.
This attempt of the executive branch to bend the highest court to its political will is not new, but rather reflects the progressives’ technocratic and tyrannical impulses blocked by the Constitution’s separated and balanced government powers and enumerated rights.
In 1937 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his New Deal schemes blocked by a court with conservative leanings, tried to weaken the court with the Judicial Reform Act that allowed the president to appoint up to six new justices, one for every sitting justice over 70 years old. This attempt to neuter one-third of the government died in the Senate Judiciary Committee Report: “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America,” the Committee concluded.
But like rust, progressives never sleep, and 87 years later they are once again trying to undermine the Constitution for political gain. This attempt will likely fail, as FDR’s did. But the mere threat might influence some justices in the Supreme Court, just as the court not long after FDT’s failed attempt ruled in the president’s favor in three cases critical for the New Deal program that became the giant step towards “fundamentally transforming the United States.”
Moreover, it is particularly shameful that Biden’s attempted politicization of the Supreme Court comes from one of the most eager purveyors of dishonest political attacks on candidates for the court. Robert H. Bork, nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987, taught law at Yale, and served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Joe Biden, at the time Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, oversaw the subsequent confirmation hearings that led to Bork’s rejection on nakedly ideological and partisan grounds, so viciously that the hearing begot the verb “to bork,” which means to brutally and mendaciously attack a candidate not on the grounds of competence, but rather on the basis of presumed retrograde attitudes to issues dear to the progressive elite.
Indeed, Biden’s fellow Democrat Teddy Kennedy delivered one of the most dishonest, demagogic, and slanderous statements ever made by a Senator: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.” This shameful statement should be on the Big Lies roll of dishonor.
Biden wasn’t on the committee for another infamous confirmation hatchet job, but it was consistent with his modus operandi of bare-knuckle partisan politicization, this time directed at another brilliant jurist, Clarence Thomas, in 1991. As the Dems did during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2019, the Committee conjured up a woman who without solid evidence accused Thomas of sexual harassment; worse, the subsequent hearings evoked racist slurs against black men’s sexuality. As Thomas put it, “This [hearing] is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
That a Senator who participated in such blatant politicization of his Constitutional duty should now, as a lame-duck president, promote even greater assaults on the Constitution testifies to how far our country’s political order has decayed.
But we all know that “corruption” and “accountability” aren’t the point. Rather, the purpose of “reforms” is to influence the court more intrusively and successfully for partisan passions and interests that differ from, and conflict with those of other citizens. Moreover, the Supreme Court is a power not directly accountable to the people’s votes, making it more easily influenced by the other two branches of government.
That’s why populists and anti-Federalists like Andrew Jackson looked with suspicion on the antidemocratic “filters” like the Senate being appointed by state legislators, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court, each of the last two, like the Senate back then, Jackson deemed “an elitist body of men committed to the principles of aristocracy and totally unrepresentative to the people.”
Modern progressives––though champions of technocratic elites who distrust and disdain the “deplorables” and “bitter clingers” ––similarly dislike the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. The Senate in 1913 with the 17th Amendment was switched from appointment by state legislators, to election by popular vote. But it remains a progressive target for “reforms” to make the number of Senators proportionate to a state’s population, another feature of what Aristotle called “extreme democracy” and its radical egalitarianism, or what we call “equity” ––a political gate-way drug to the tyranny of the majority.
The ultimate goal of all these “reforms,” then is to weaken the checked and balanced powers of the Constitution and the sovereign states, and replace them with an autocratic elite comprising the “hundreds who are wise” to guide and direct the millions who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish,” as progressive Woodrow Wilson put it. Or as our self-styled “brights” might say, empower the few who “follow the science” to control the MAGA legions of “deniers” and “bitter clingers” to tradition, common sense, and faith––the three eternal enemies of all autocrats and tyrants who seek to monopolize authority and power.
Finally, today’s progressives are motivated by the “catastrophe” of Donald Trump’s term, during which he appointed to the Supreme Court three conservative and mostly originalist jurists who have provided decisions limiting progressive political shibboleths and policies, such as the unconstitutional powers granted to our technocratic federal agencies; and prior precedents iconic to progressives, like Roe v. Wade, that encroached on the powers of the states and their citizens over issues like abortion, to name a few.
Biden’s “reforms,” then, are not about restoring “norms,” whatever those are, or mitigating “impact[ed] freedoms,” a shameless phrase coming from a party that colludes with social media to hollow out our First Amendment freedoms. Rather, the proposed “reforms” are an attempt to further corrupt the Supreme Court to benefit a political ideology that for a century has been trying to dismantle our political order and diminish our unalienable rights.
So, the question for voters this election is, which candidate will embrace and intensify those efforts, and which will resist them and restore the integrity of our Constitution and Bill of Rights?
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